vet

Documentation

Overview

Vet examines Go source code and reports suspicious constructs, such as Printf calls whose arguments do not align with the format string. Vet uses heuristics that do not guarantee all reports are genuine problems, but it can find errors not caught by the compilers.

It can be invoked three ways:

By package, from the go tool:

go vet package/path/name

vets the package whose path is provided.

By files:

go tool vet source/directory/*.go

vets the files named, all of which must be in the same package.

By directory:

go tool vet source/directory

recursively descends the directory, vetting each package it finds.

Vet's exit code is 2 for erroneous invocation of the tool, 1 if a problem was reported, and 0 otherwise. Note that the tool does not check every possible problem and depends on unreliable heuristics so it should be used as guidance only, not as a firm indicator of program correctness.

By default all checks are performed. If any flags are explicitly set to true, only those tests are run. Conversely, if any flag is explicitly set to false, only those tests are disabled. Thus -printf=true runs the printf check, -printf=false runs all checks except the printf check.

Available checks:

Parity of log.Write and log.Fatal

Flag: -logparity

Calls to chain/log.Write that have an odd number of key/value arguments.

Other flags

These flags configure the behavior of vet:

-all (default true)
	Check everything; disabled if any explicit check is requested.
-v
	Verbose mode

Vet is a simple checker for static errors in Go source code. See doc.go for more information.