The aim of GOBL is to provide a means for the distribution of GO packages without necessarily sharing source code. These packages should still support normal GO tooling for build and documentation.

GOBL files are intended to be a flexible for container for binary + partial source or source only distribution of GO code.

GOBL files are simply Gzip compressed tarballs with a .gobl extension containing a subset of a GO work area; as such you can extract the contents of one by issuing

$ tar -xzf some.package.gobl

An example GOBL file would have the following structure

src/
    github.com/
        banana/
            split.go
pkg/
    linux_amd64/
        banana/
            split.a

The immediate child dirs of pkg/ have the form $GOOS_$GOARCH

The gobl command line tool can be used to pack, publish and consume GOBL packages.

The gobl tool is installed from source using

$ go get github.com/toshaf/gobl

Just make sure it's on your $PATH` and you're ready to go.

The general usage pattern for the gobl tool is

$ gobl <command> <options> <inputs>

Where command specifies the action you wish to take, inputs are the inputs specific to the command (if any) and options are the set of adjustments/configurations you wish to specify, again specific to the chosen command.

The gobl tool requires the $GOPATH environment variable to be set - all package paths are based on this.

The pack command will create a GOBL package from the GO package(s) specified.

The name of the file generated will be the longest common prefix of all the packages packed with forward slashes converted to dots and with the .gobl extension; packing github.com/toshaf/exhibit would result in a GOBL package called github.com.toshaf.exhibit.gobl.

A single input specifying name of the GO package(s) to be packed is required; this takes the form of either a single package name or the name of a package to recursively pack.

To pack the package github.com/banana/split you'd issue

$ gobl pack github.com/banana/split

To pack all packages under github.com/banana/split/ you'd issue

$ gobl pack github.com/banana/split/...

Either way you'd end up with a file called $GOPATH/gobl-pkg/github.com.banana.split.gobl.

The install command unpacks a GOBL file for consumption by GO programs placing the contents under $GOPATH/src and $GOPATH/pkg as appropriate.

The gobl tool takes a single input specifying the full path to the GOBL file to be installed.

Note: to enable consumers to build against binary distributions GOBL sets the mtimes of the .a files such that they look newer to GO than their counterpart .go files - you are discouraged from altering the mtimes of these files. Build errors resulting from this change can be fixed by simply re-installing a GOBL file.