Gold is a Go local docs server, Go docs generator, and a Go code reader. It tries to extract as much information as possible from Go code to help gophers use and study Go packages.

• Demo of the generated docs for standard packages (please note that the demo site lacks of several features in the local server version).
• FAQ.
• Please follow @Go100and1 to get the latest news of Gold.

Run go get -u go101.org/gold to install (and update) Gold.

Notes:

• If the tool name gold conflicts with another tool with the same name you are using, you can run go get -u go101.org/gold/godoge instead to install Gold as godoge.
• The GO111MODULE enviroment variable might need to be set as on to utilize the GOPROXY setting, depending on your Go Toolchain version and the directory in which the installation command runs.

• Supports listing exported types not only by alphabet, but also by popularity, which is good to understanding some packages exporting many types.
• Rich type information collection:
  • Shows type implemention relations (demo 1 and demo 2).
  • Shows method implementation relations (demo).
  • Shows promoted selectors, even on unexported embedded fields (demo).
  • Shows as-parameters-of and as-results-of function/method list (including interface methods).
• Smooth code view experiences (good for studying Go projects without opening IDEs):
  • Click a local identifier to highlight all the occurences of the identifier.
  • Click a reference to a non-local identifier to jump to the declaration of the non-local identifier, and fell free to open pages in new browser windows as needed.
• Shows code statistics (demo).
• Supports generating static HTML docs pages, to avoid rebuilding the docs later. And this is good for package developers to host docs of their packages.
• All functionalities are implemented locally, no external websites are needed.
• JavaScript-off friendly. No tracing, no auto external websites visiting.

(NOTE: This tool is still in its early experimental phase. More new features will be added from time to time in future versions.)

Go Toolchain 1.13+ is needed to run Gold (and 1.14+ is needed to build Gold).

This project uses the golang.org/x/tools/go/packages package to parse code. The golang.org/x/tools/go/package is great, but it also has a shortcoming: there are no ways to get module/package downloading/preparing progress.

All packages must compile okay to get their docs shown.

Only a code snapshot is analyzed. When code changes, a new analyzation is needed from scratch.

Testing packages are excluded currently.

Code examples in docs are not shown currently.

Start the docs server:

• Run gold . or gold to show docs of the package in the current directory (and all its dependency packages).
• Run gold ./... to show docs of all packages under the current directory (and all their dependency packages).
• Run gold std to show docs of standard packages.

Each of the above commands will open a browser window automatically. We can use the -s or -silent flags to turn off the behavior.

Generate static HTML docs pages (the -dir flag is optional in this mode, its default value is .):

• gold -gen -dir=generated
• gold -gen -dir=generated ./...
• gold -gen -dir=generated std

We can run gold -dir=. from the HTML docs generation directory to view the generated docs.

The following results are got on a machine with an AMD-2200G CPU (4 cores 4 threads) and sufficient memory. Go Toolchain 1.14.3 is used in the analyzations.

Before running the gold ./... command, the go build ./... command is run to ensure that all involved modules/packages are fetched to local machine and verify cgo tools (if needed) have been installed.

There are still some famous projects failing to build (with the go build ./... command, at May 27th, 2020), such as docker, gvisor and traefik, so Gold is unable to build docs for them.

There are also some projects not using go modules, such as hashicorp/nomad and openshift/origin, and GOPROXY doesn't take effect for the go mod init command (as of Go Toolchain 1.14), so I couldn't build docs for these projects on my machine (this is my network problem, it might work on your machine).