Unix Piping Course with Go

This course will show you how to make a Go binary that acts as a unix tool.

We will read data from stdin, convert it to our custom JSON model and push it through to stdout, completing the cycle.

This is a beginner to intermediate course for both Go and Unix, some things will be explained, but if you're unsure you should be able to autonomously search for the right information.

Background

The Unix philosophy is to have tools only do one thing and by reading and writing from stdout these tools can be combined to create pipelines of work that needs to be done.

An example you might have seen already is using curl to query a JSON endpoint and using jq to pretty-print this to your screen.

curl -s https://dummyjson.com/test | jq

A lot of these small, do one thing well, tools are written in C, but there's no reason we can't make our own in Go!

Requirements

• You'll need to have Go installed. (See Go install)
• You'll need to run this in a Unix-based system (assuming macOS)
• (Optional) Docker
• (Optional) We will use jq as well

Steps

This course is divided into steps, navigate to step1 and make sure to read the individual READMEs.

If you're really new to Go, you can check out step0, it will explain how to create an executable Go program along with how importing packages works. Make sure you have also done the Go tour so you know the basic Go syntax.

The README explains what needs to be done and what the exercise is, it also contains background information. If something is not covered don't be afraid to search for more information on Wikipedia, pkg.go.dev or StackOverflow.

Each step also contains a ref.go which is a reference and/or the answer for that step. Reading this before you do the exercise is considered cheating! ;)