Share Go code on GitHub
Programming Snapshot – Go Code on GitHub
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Go makes it easy to bundle universal code into a package and share it with the world on GitHub. Mike Schilli explains the tricks and how to avoid the pitfalls.
Attentive readers of this column will have noticed that the Go listings covered here often reference packages on GitHub, which the Go compiler picks up from there and integrates into the binaries as libraries. But you can't always take, take, take. Instead, let's contribute back! How hard could it be to write your own code and share it with the world on GitHub? Then programmers near and far can use it, saving them the time they could otherwise use to sing the originator's praises.
By way of an example, a simple package that allows a Go application to store the passwords and API tokens it uses in an external file would be useful. These strings should never be part of the code, and not just because the listings are printed here in the magazine. Hard-coded strings are also frowned upon in production releases, because the code is usually openly available in a GitHub repo and automatic installations like to roll out binaries and secrets separately – just as if the user were configuring them manually after installation.
Take a look at the sample application shown in Listing 1, for example. It determines the five most frequently viewed videos on a YouTube channel and requires a secret API key and a channel ID to do so. Instead of keeping strings with secret data in the code, the code calls the Lookup() function twice. It reads a string for the specified keyword from an external humanly readable file (in the example, "youtube-api-key" and "youtube-channel-id") and returns the results to the application.
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