Setting Go variables from the outside

CloudFlare's DNS server, RRDNS, is written in Go and the DNS team used to generate a file called version.go in our Makefile. version.go looked something like this:

// THIS FILE IS AUTOGENERATED BY THE MAKEFILE. DO NOT EDIT.

// +build	make

package version

var (
	Version   = "2015.6.2-6-gfd7e2d1-dev"
	BuildTime = "2015-06-16-0431 UTC"
)

and was used to embed version information in RRDNS. It was built inside the Makefile using sed and git describe from a template file. It worked, but was pretty ugly.

Today we noticed that another Go team at CloudFlare, the Data team, had a much smarter way to bake version numbers into binaries using the -X linker option.

The -X Go linker option, which you can set with -ldflags, sets the value of a string variable in the Go program being linked. You use it like this: -X main.version 1.0.0.

A simple example: let's say you have this source file saved as hello.go.

package main

import "fmt"

var who = "World"

func main() {
    fmt.Printf("Hello, %s.\n", who)
}

Then you can use go run (or other build commands like go build or go install) with the -ldflags option to modify the value of the who variable:

$ go run hello.go
Hello, World.
$ go run -ldflags="-X main.who CloudFlare" hello.go
Hello, CloudFlare.

The format is importpath.name string, so it's possible to set the value of any string anywhere in the Go program, not just in main. Note that from Go 1.5 the syntax has changed to importpath.name=string. The old style is still supported but the linker will complain.

I was worried this would not work with external linking (for example when using cgo) but as we can see with -ldflags="-linkmode=external -v" the Go linker runs first anyway and takes care of our -X.

$ go build -x -ldflags="-X main.who CloudFlare -linkmode=external -v" hello.go
WORK=/var/folders/v8/xdj2snz51sg2m2bnpmwl_91c0000gn/T/go-build149644699
mkdir -p $WORK/command-line-arguments/_obj/
cd /Users/filippo/tmp/X
/usr/local/Cellar/go/1.4.2/libexec/pkg/tool/darwin_amd64/6g -o $WORK/command-line-arguments.a -trimpath $WORK -p command-line-arguments -complete -D _/Users/filippo/tmp/X -I $WORK -pack ./hello.go
cd .
/usr/local/Cellar/go/1.4.2/libexec/pkg/tool/darwin_amd64/6l -o hello -L $WORK -X main.hi hi -linkmode=external -v -extld=clang $WORK/command-line-arguments.a
# command-line-arguments
HEADER = -H1 -T0x2000 -D0x0 -R0x1000
searching for runtime.a in $WORK/runtime.a
searching for runtime.a in /usr/local/Cellar/go/1.4.2/libexec/pkg/darwin_amd64/runtime.a
 0.06 deadcode
 0.07 pclntab=284969 bytes, funcdata total 49800 bytes
 0.07 dodata
 0.08 symsize = 0
 0.08 symsize = 0
 0.08 reloc
 0.09 reloc
 0.09 asmb
 0.09 codeblk
 0.09 datblk
 0.09 dwarf
 0.09 sym
 0.09 headr
host link: clang -m64 -gdwarf-2 -Wl,-no_pie,-pagezero_size,4000000 -o hello -Qunused-arguments /var/folders/v8/xdj2snz51sg2m2bnpmwl_91c0000gn/T//go-link-mFNNCD/000000.o /var/folders/v8/xdj2snz51sg2m2bnpmwl_91c0000gn/T//go-link-mFNNCD/000001.o /var/folders/v8/xdj2snz51sg2m2bnpmwl_91c0000gn/T//go-link-mFNNCD/go.o -g -O2 -g -O2 -lpthread
 0.17 cpu time
33619 symbols
64 sizeof adr
216 sizeof prog
23412 liveness data

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