Building static binaries is one of the best features of Go which enables us to ship our code efficiently.
Basic Build
We can build Go programs very easily using the go build command.
package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
fmt.Println("I am a binary!")
}
example.
Specifying Output
We can also specify the output filename:
Now to run this, we simply need to execute it:
Yes, it’s as simple as that!
Build-Time Variables
Let’s talk about some important build-time variables that give you more control over the compilation process.
GOOS and GOARCH
These environment variables help us build Go programs for different operating systems and underlying processor architectures.
We can list all the supported architectures using the go tool command:
android/amd64
ios/amd64
js/wasm
linux/amd64
windows/arm64
.
.
.
Cross-Compilation Example
Here’s an example for building a Windows executable from macOS:
GOOS=windows GOARCH=amd64 go build -o app.exe
CGO_ENABLED
This variable allows us to configure CGO, which is a way in Go to call C code.
This helps us to produce a statically linked binary that works without any external dependencies.
This is quite helpful when we want to run our Go binaries in a Docker container with minimum external dependencies.
CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -o app