Rustaceans have been spoiled by Rust's clap (or, at least, I think they have). The derive macros, the ergonomics, the fact that you can describe an entire CLI with a struct and be done with it — it's really nice. I've never actually used (never tried Rust), but every time I see an example, I think "I wish Go had this." Go's standard flag package works, and urfave/cli is the one I reach for when I need more, but neither has that declarative feel. So I wrote glap.

Define your CLI with a struct and some tags:

type CLI struct {
    Config  string `glap:"config,short=c,required,help=Path to config file"`
    Verbose bool   `glap:"verbose,short=v,help=Enable verbose output"`
    Port    int    `glap:"port,short=p,default=8080,help=Port to listen on"`
    Output  string `glap:"output,short=o,possible=json|text|yaml,default=text,help=Output format"`
}

Parse it, use it. Subcommands, env var fallback, validators, groups, conflicts/requires, colored help, shell completions — all there. It's still beta, but it's working well for me.

The blog has officially been given comment support. While the articles themselves are markdown files in the repository and are pre-rendered to json during the build process, the comments are stored in a database. Authentication is provided by GitHub OAuth.

For the time being, I'm going to have it so that I need to approve comments when they are posted. Hopefully with the GitHub OAuth requirement there won't be too much spam. Guess we shall find out - that was the reason I removed comment support in the first place.

Unfortunately, I no longer have the comments from older vimtips.org articles. Not sure what happened to them. I guess when I turned them off I forgot to back them up. Oh well 😉

When I was making the current version of this blog, there was a lot of discussion on Twitter around improving load times and responsiveness on dynamic websites, complete with lots of demonstrations of instant load times even for things that access the database, like searches. I decided to see what I could pull off with this little site, served from a cheap VPS. I was able to get it to a perfect score on Lighthouse, and indeed, if you click around on the links or use the search box, you will see that things load pretty much instantly.

Do you use distroless? Have you tried to build a distroless docker image for your Go project, only to see an error like /bin/foo: no such file or directory? Maybe you spent a bunch of time trying to figure out why that file isn't there, only to find out that it IS there, but you're still getting the error?

This post is for you!