bindata

This package converts any file into go code. It is heavily inspired by the excellent go-bindata.

Why another library?

I found myself trying a archive quite a few (as in 1000s) of small files. Other libraries make a trade off to compress all files individually in order to speed up access. This library will archive and compress all files together to decrease the size of the resulting file. On access, it will decompress all files and keep them in memory for frequent access.

Usage

bindata can be used as library or as a commandline tool.

Usage as Library

Import the following package to use bindata in your code:

github.com/mhelmich/bindata

The following snippet explains how to use bindata to create a bindata file from your Go program.

import bd "github.com/mhelmich/bindata"

...

err = bd.New(
    []string{"path/to/files/*.json"},
    bd.PackageName("test"),
    bd.OutputFile("test/bindata_files.go"),
    bd.Archiver(bd.Tar),
    bd.Compressor(bd.Bz),
).Archive()

Usage as Cmd Tool

Run the following to install bindata:

> go get -u github.com/mhelmich/bindata/cmd/bindata

The simplest call of bindata passes only file paths to it. In this invocation, the package name and the output file will be defaulted to bindata and bindata/bindata.go respectively.

> bindata dir/file1.json dir/file2.json

However bindata paths can contain wildcards/globs:

> bindata dir/*.json dir/**/*.json

bindata can be configured to write the output file to a particular path. In this case, bindata automatically uses the last element of the path as package name:

> bindata -o mypackage/bindata_files.go dir/*.json dir/**/*.json

If for some reason you need to configure the package name of the generated bindata file independently from the given path, use the package flag:

> bindata -o mypackage/bindata_files.go -package otherpackage dir/*.json dir/**/*.json

Configuration

Right now bindata supports the following configurations:

TarBz - a bz compressed tar archive

Accessing a File

The generated bindata file exports two public functions FileNames and ReadFile.

ReadFile

ReadFile reads the file named by filename and returns the contents. A successful call returns err == nil, not err == EOF. Because ReadFile reads the whole file, it does not treat an EOF from Read as an error to be reported.

It can be used like this:

data, err := bindata.ReadFile(an)
if err != nil {
    // err != nil if the file wasn't found in the bindata file
}

FileNames

FileNames returns a list of all files in this bindata file.

It can be used like this:

for _, fileName := range bindata.FileNames() {
    // fileName contains a file name now
}