alecthomas/kingpin

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

3568 stars · 279 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Kingpin is a fluent-style, type-safe command-line and flag parser for Go, supporting flags, nested sub-commands, positional arguments, and shell completion. It is feature-stable but contributions-only, with the author recommending his newer library Kong for new projects.

Use cases

• parse command-line flags in a Go program
• build a CLI tool with nested subcommands
• generate bash/zsh/fish shell completions for a Go CLI
• define required and default flag values with type safety
• handle positional arguments in a command-line application

When to choose

• you are maintaining an existing Go project that already uses Kingpin
• you need a mature, feature-stable flag and subcommand parser for Go
• you want a fluent, type-safe API for CLI parsing

When to avoid

• you are starting a new Go project and want active maintenance (consider Kong instead)
• you need bug fixes or new features guaranteed by the maintainer
• you need a parser for a language other than Go

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

cli parser developer-tools parsers go cross-platform flag-parsing command-line-parser subcommands shell-completion fluent-api command-line

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="alecthomas/kingpin")