golangcilint

Golangci-lint, often written as golangci-lint, is a fast, multi-linter tool for Go. It serves as a single runner that executes a suite of static analysis and code quality checkers on a Go project and reports the results in a unified output.

The tool aggregates a wide range of linters, including well-known analyzers such as staticcheck, gosimple, govet, ineffassign, deadcode, and errcheck, among others. By running these linters together, golangci-lint provides a comprehensive overview of potential issues, style problems, and possible bugs in a Go codebase. It supports parallel execution, caching of results to speed up subsequent runs, and configurable scopes to focus on changed packages or specific directories.

Golangci-lint is distributed as a single executable binary, which can be installed via an official installation script, through Go tooling (go install), or via package managers on various platforms. It is commonly used in local development and integrated into continuous integration (CI) workflows to enforce code quality as part of the build process.

Configuration is handled with a YAML or TOML file (for example, .golangci.yml or golangci-lint.yaml) that specifies which linters to enable or disable, per-linter settings, and exclusion rules. Users can tailor the configuration to their project structure, exclude vendor directories, or limit analysis to specific packages or paths. Typical usage involves running golangci-lint run at the project root, optionally with parameters such as --deadline to bound analysis time.

Golangci-lint is widely adopted in the Go community for maintaining code quality, reducing false positives through configuration, and providing a fast, centralized linting workflow.