How do you write a package with multiple binaries in it?

If you don't want to install the binaries into $GOPATH/bin, you could do what other open source projects do, which is create a script.

Most of the projects out there have make files and build scripts for producing multiple binaries.

In your case, you could build a script that iterates over the packages in cmd, and run go build on each.

cd $GOPATH/someProject
for CMD in `ls cmd`; do
  go build ./cmd/$CMD
done

This results in:

[root@node1 test]# ls $GOPATH/someProject
bin1  bin2  cmd

Couple of trending projects that you can look at:

  • Grafana - https://github.com/grafana/grafana/blob/master/build.go
  • Torus - https://github.com/coreos/torus/blob/master/Makefile
  • Caddy - https://github.com/mholt/caddy/blob/master/dist/automate.go

The command:

go install ./...

should build all binaries under your current directory (i.e. ./...) and put them on $GOPATH/bin.


From the go build help:

When compiling multiple packages or a single non-main package, build compiles the packages but discards the resulting object, serving only as a check that the packages can be built.

In order to build all packages under a directory, you can run go install ./.... All of your packages will be built and installed (i.e. put under $GOPATH/bin).

With your example, you'd have two executables produced: $GOPATH/bin/bin1 and $GOPATH/bin/bin2

There is also the alternative of writing a simple Makefile to do what you want.

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