I want to make sure that I can print out the version information from my Go builds. To do this I need to embed the current version information automatically into the application when I build it. Following the information at https://blog.alexellis.io/inject-build-time-vars-golang/ and this https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11354518/application-auto-build-versioning, I have the following boilerplate: This should go into the main package of the application:

var (
	BuildVersion = ""
	BuildTime    = ""
	GitHash = ""
	GitBranch = ""
)

and in my func init():

    printVersion := false
    flag.BoolVar(&printVersion, "version", false, "Print the version")

    flag.Parse()

    if printVersion {
        fmt.Printf("Git Branch: %s\n", GitBranch)
        fmt.Printf("Git Hash: %s\n", GitHash)
        fmt.Printf("Build Version: %s\n", BuildVersion)
        fmt.Printf("Build Time: %s\n", BuildTime)
        os.Exit(0)
    }

The missing piece is the following Makefile:

git_hash:=$(shell git rev-parse HEAD)
git_branch:=$(shell git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)
version=1.0.0
time:=$(shell /bin/date '+%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M')

SOURCES := $(shell find . -name '*.go')

ALL: app

app: $(SOURCES) Makefile
	go build -ldflags="-X 'main.BuildTime=${time}' -X 'main.BuildVersion=${version}' -X 'main.GitHash=${git_hash}' -X 'main.GitBranch=${git_branch}'"