jessevdk/go-flags

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2697 stars · 325 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

go-flags is a Go library for parsing command line options, offering more features than the standard flag package. It uses structs, reflection, and struct tags to define options concisely, supporting short/long names, defaults, choices, slices, maps, callbacks, and automatic help generation.

Use cases

• parse command line flags in a Go CLI
• define CLI options with struct tags instead of manual parsing
• generate formatted help messages for a command line tool
• support combined short options like -aux in a Go app
• parse options into typed fields like ints, slices, and maps
• build nested option groups and subcommands

When to choose

• you need richer option parsing than Go's builtin flag package
• you want declarative option definitions via struct tags
• you need automatic, well-formatted help output
• your CLI uses short flags, long flags, choices, or repeated options

When to avoid

• you only need a couple of simple flags and prefer zero dependencies
• you need subcommand-style CLIs with a framework like cobra
• you are not writing Go

Facets

library · maturity stable

parser cli developer-tools developer-tools programming-languages go cross-platform cli command-line-parsing flags option-parser reflection-based struct-tags help-generation command-line

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