NOTE: Golint is deprecated and frozen.
There's no drop-in replacement for it, but tools such as Staticcheck
and go vet should be used instead.
Golint is a linter for Go source code.
Installation
Golint requires a
supported release of Go.
go get -u golang.org/x/lint/golint
To find out where golint was installed you can run go list -f {{.Target}} golang.org/x/lint/golint. For golint to be used globally add that directory to the $PATH environment setting.
Usage
Invoke golint with one or more filenames, directories, or packages named
by its import path. Golint uses the same
import path syntax as
the go command and therefore
also supports relative import paths like ./.... Additionally the ...
wildcard can be used as suffix on relative and absolute file paths to recurse
into them.
The output of this tool is a list of suggestions in Vim quickfix format,
which is accepted by lots of different editors.
Purpose
Golint differs from gofmt. Gofmt reformats Go source code, whereas
golint prints out style mistakes.
Golint differs from govet. Govet is concerned with correctness, whereas
golint is concerned with coding style. Golint is in use at Google, and it
seeks to match the accepted style of the open source Go project.
The suggestions made by golint are exactly that: suggestions.
Golint is not perfect, and has both false positives and false negatives.
Do not treat its output as a gold standard. We will not be adding pragmas
or other knobs to suppress specific warnings, so do not expect or require
code to be completely "lint-free".
In short, this tool is not, and will never be, trustworthy enough for its
suggestions to be enforced automatically, for example as part of a build process.
Golint makes suggestions for many of the mechanically checkable items listed in
Effective Go and the
CodeReviewComments wiki page.
Scope
Golint is meant to carry out the stylistic conventions put forth in
Effective Go and
CodeReviewComments.
Changes that are not aligned with those documents will not be considered.
Contributions
Contributions to this project are welcome provided they are in scope,
though please send mail before starting work on anything major.
Contributors retain their copyright, so we need you to fill out
a short form
before we can accept your contribution.
Vim
Add this to your ~/.vimrc:
set rtp+=$GOPATH/src/golang.org/x/lint/misc/vim
If you have multiple entries in your GOPATH, replace $GOPATH with the right value.
Running :Lint will run golint on the current file and populate the quickfix list.
Optionally, add this to your ~/.vimrc to automatically run golint on :w
autocmd BufWritePost,FileWritePost *.go execute 'Lint' | cwindow
Emacs
Add this to your .emacs file:
(add-to-list 'load-path (concat (getenv "GOPATH") "/src/golang.org/x/lint/misc/emacs/"))
(require 'golint)
If you have multiple entries in your GOPATH, replace $GOPATH with the right value.
Running M-x golint will run golint on the current file.
For more usage, see Compilation-Mode.
