ALalexellisuk·Nov 11, 2020
Most popular Go CLIs use https://github.com/spf13/cobra
i.e. Docker / K8s / OpenFaaS and similar
In Five Keys to create a killer CLI in Gospf13
cobra
Go2015–2026
spf13 / cobra
cobra
A Commander for modern Go CLI interactions
40Distinct people
42Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
44.8KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A Commander for modern Go CLI interactions
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- muesli/coral · linked in 4 of the same discussions
- spf13/pflag · linked in 3 of the same discussions
- spf13/viper · linked in 3 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 10:49:33 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year42 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-01-03 00:09:24 UTC to 2026-01-14 14:05:20 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 2 | 6 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
5 sourcesMy impression is that nobody bothers with the Go flags package and most people use the POSIX compatible pflag [1] library for argument parsing, usually via the awsome cobra [2] cli framework.
Or they just use viper [3] for both command line and general configuration handling. No point reinventing the wheel or trying to remember some weird non-standard quirks.
[1] https://github.com/spf13/pflag
[2] https://github.com/spf13/cobra
[3] https://github.com/spf13/viper
In Conventions for Command Line OptionsGo is a particularly good language for CLI's I have found. At least compared to Java/C#/Python.
It's reasonably fast, compiles down to a simple to distribute binary, and the language is forgiving enough that you can do exploratory programming in it. Go-routines make it especially easy to deal with network calls in it as well. For anything that needs absolute performance though look elsewhere, but even then Go might be a good choice for prototyping.
I actually started learning Go with CLI applications. I have found that https://github.com/spf13/cobra tends to be one of the better CLI helpers you can get into but https://github.com/jpillora/opts is one I have been meaning to try following a presentation I saw on it once.
In Diving into Go by building a CLI applicationSince everyone else is throwing out recommendations I personally think https://github.com/spf13/cobra is the best CLI templating system, especially because of how well it pairs with https://github.com/spf13/viper.
Large projects like Hugo and Kubernetes have used Cobra to build their CLI tools, and it's fairly light as well even if you need simpler usage. We use it at my workplace simply for wrapping our microservices and the few commands (serve, migrate, etc)
In Diving into Go by building a CLI applicationI know what you mean. Go's spf13/cobra will soon have working zsh/bash/fish/powershell autocomplete generation!
https://github.com/spf13/cobra/pull/1070
In OpenAutoComplete: Shell-agnostic, cross-platform autocomplete specification