winres

Package winres provides functions for embedding resources in a Windows executable built with Go.

Most often, you'll want to embed an application icon, a manifest, and "version information", which is what you can see in the Details tab of file properties.

Command line tool

If you are looking for a command line tool, please head to go-winres.

Alternatives

This project is similar to akavel/rsrc and josephspurrier/goversioninfo.

Limitations

This is not a real resource compiler, which means it won't help you embed these UI definitions:

ACCELERATORS
DIALOGEX
MENUEX
POPUP

If you ever need them, which is unlikely, use one of those tools instead:

rc.exe and cvtres.exe from Visual Studio
windres from GNU Binary Utilities
llvm-rc and llvm-cvtres from LLVM tools

See Resource Compiler for more information.

Usage

To embed resources, you need an .rsrc section in your executable. Winres provides functions to compile this .rsrc section into a COFF object file.

Put this file in your project directory, name it "something.syso" or, preferably, "something_windows_amd64.syso", and you're done : the go build command will detect it and automatically use it.

You should have a look at the command line tool to try it. Using the library gives you more control, though.

Here is a quick example:

package main

import (
	"io/ioutil"
	"os"

	"github.com/tc-hib/winres"
)

func main() {
	// Start by creating an empty resource set
	rs := winres.ResourceSet{}

	// Add resources
	// This is a cursor named ID(1)
	cursorData, _ := ioutil.ReadFile("cursor.cur")
	rs.Set(winres.RT_CURSOR, winres.ID(1), 0, cursorData)

	// This is a custom data type, translated in english (0x409) and french (0x40C)
	// You can find more language IDs by searching for LCID
	rs.Set(winres.Name("CUSTOM"), winres.Name("COOLDATA"), 0x409, []byte("Hello World"))
	rs.Set(winres.Name("CUSTOM"), winres.Name("COOLDATA"), 0x40C, []byte("Bonjour Monde"))

	// Compile to a COFF object file
	// It is recommended to use the target suffix "_window_amd64"
	// so that `go build` knows when not to include it.
	out, _ := os.Create("rsrc_windows_amd64.syso")
	rs.WriteObject(out, winres.ArchAMD64)
}

Thanks

Many thanks to akavel for his help.

This project uses these very helpful libs: