How can I open files relative to my GOPATH?

I wrote gobundle to solve exactly this problem. It generates Go source code from data files, which you then compile into your binary. You can then access the file data through a VFS-like layer. It's completely portable, supports adding entire file trees, compression, etc.

The downside is that you need an intermediate step to build the Go files from the source data. I usually use make for this.

Here's how you'd iterate over all files in a bundle, reading the bytes:

for _, name := range bundle.Files() {
    r, _ := bundle.Open(name)
    b, _ := ioutil.ReadAll(r)
    fmt.Printf("file %s has length %d\n", name, len(b))
}

You can see a real example of its use in my GeoIP package. The Makefile generates the code, and geoip.go uses the VFS.

this seems to work pretty well:

import "os"
import "io/ioutil"

pwd, _ := os.Getwd()
txt, _ := ioutil.ReadFile(pwd+"/path/to/file.txt")

Hmm... the path/filepath package has Abs() which does what I need (so far) though it's a bit inconvenient:

absPath, _ := filepath.Abs("../mypackage/data/file.txt")

Then I use absPath to load the file and it works fine.

Note that, in my case, the data files are in a package separate from the main package from which I'm running the program. If it was all in the same package, I'd remove the leading ../mypackage/. Since this path is obviously relative, different programs will have different structures and need this adjusted accordingly.

If there's a better way to use external resources with a Go program and keep it portable, feel free to contribute another answer.

I think Alec Thomas has provided The Answer, but in my experience it isn't foolproof. One problem I had with compiling resources into the binary is that compiling may require a lot of memory depending on the size of your assets. If they're small, then it's probably nothing to worry about. In my particular scenario, a 1MB font file was causing compilation to require somewhere around 1GB of memory to compile. It was a problem because I wanted it to be go gettable on a Raspberry Pi. This was with Go 1.0; things may have improved in Go 1.1.

So in that particular case, I opt to just use the go/build package to find the source directory of the program based on the import path. Of course, this requires that your targets have a GOPATH set up and that the source is available. So it isn't an ideal solution in all cases.