others-How to install and use godoc tool for golang programming?
How to install and use godoc tool for golang programming ?
Problem
Sometimes you want to find some examples or specifications of a go module(package), you should use godoc, it is a tool to find the documents of a package quickly, but when you execute the godoc command in command line, you get some error message like this:
godoc fmt
command not found: godoc
Environments
The environments are as follows:
- go version: go version go1.14.2 darwin/amd64
- GOROOT: /usr/local/go
- GOPATH: /Users/me/GoProjects/src
- IDE: Intellij Idea Ultimate 2019.3 with go plugin
The godoc tool
GoDoc hosts documentation for Go packages on Bitbucket, GitHub, Launchpad and Google Project Hosting.
The source code for GoDoc is available on GitHub.
GoDoc displays documentation for GOOS=linux unless otherwise noted at the bottom of the documentation page.
Use godoc in your terminal
If you want to lookup some package’s documents in command line, you should install the go tool at first.
GoTools holds the source for various packages and tools that support the Go programming language.
Some of the tools, godoc and vet for example, are included in binary Go distributions.
Others, including the Go guru and the test coverage tool, can be fetched with go get.
Packages include a type-checker for Go and an implementation of the Static Single Assignment form (SSA) representation for Go programs.
Install godoc tool with golang tools
You should install the godoc command like this:
go get -v golang.org/x/tools/cmd/godoc
go: found golang.org/x/tools/cmd/godoc in golang.org/x/tools v0.0.0-20200717024301-6ddee64345a6
go: downloading golang.org/x/net v0.0.0-20200625001655-4c5254603344
golang.org/x/tools/godoc/vfs/gatefs
golang.org/x/tools/godoc/vfs/mapfs
golang.org/x/tools/godoc/vfs/zipfs
golang.org/x/tools/godoc/static
golang.org/x/net/context/ctxhttp
golang.org/x/tools/playground
golang.org/x/tools/godoc/redirect
golang.org/x/tools/cmd/godoc
Use the godoc tool in command line
You can now use the godoc tool in command line to lookup documents of go packages:
go doc fmt.Println
package fmt // import "fmt"
func Println(a ...interface{}) (n int, err error)
Println formats using the default formats for its operands and writes to
standard output. Spaces are always added between operands and a newline is
appended. It returns the number of bytes written and any write error
encountered.
Use the godoc tool online
Instead of using the godoc commandline , you can also use it online in your web browser:
Navigate to : https://godoc.org/ , then you get this:
search for package fmt, you get this, you can see that it more informative than the command line.
References
You can view some references as follows: