This is the second in a series of articles about build tools in the Go ecosystem.

Goyek is a simple library for creating build automation in Go.

Goyek’s focus is on simplicity and portability: it lacks sophistication found in other tools. For very simple builds, especially those that are only using Go tools, and that need to be portable across different platforms, Goyek might work for you. For anything even slightly sophisticated, I think there are better options.

In this article I will show how I ported my Makefile to Goyek and provide a brief review of Goyek. I’m going to share some code, but no deep explanations – this is not a Goyek tutorial.

This is the first in a series of articles about build tools in the Go ecosystem.

Mage is a tool that provides functionality similar to make. From their website:

Why?

Makefiles are hard to read and hard to write. Mostly because makefiles are essentially fancy bash scripts with significant white space and additional make-related syntax.

Mage lets you have multiple magefiles, name your magefiles whatever you want, and they’re easy to customize for multiple operating systems. Mage has no dependencies (aside from go) and runs just fine on all major operating systems, whereas make generally uses bash which is not well supported on Windows. Go is superior to bash for any non-trivial task involving branching, looping, anything that’s not just straight line execution of commands. And if your project is written in Go, why introduce another language as idiosyncratic as bash?

In this article I will show how I ported my Makefile to a magefile and provide a brief review of mage. I’m going to share some code, but no deep explanations – this is not a mage tutorial.