Survey

A library for building interactive prompts. Heavily inspired by the great inquirer.js.

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "github.com/tj/survey"
)

// the questions to ask
var qs = []*survey.Question{
    {
        Name:     "name",
        Prompt:   &survey.Input{Message: "What is your name?"},
        Validate: survey.Required,
    },
    {
        Name: "color",
        Prompt: &survey.Select{
            Message: "Choose a color:",
            Options: []string{"red", "blue", "green"},
            Default: "red",
        },
    },
    {
        Name: "age",
        Prompt:   &survey.Input{Message: "How old are you?"},
    },
}

func main() {
    // the answers will be written to this struct
    answers := struct {
        Name          string                  // survey will match the question and field names
        FavoriteColor string `survey:"color"` // or you can tag fields to match a specific name
        Age           int                     // if the types don't match exactly, survey will try to convert for you
    }{}

    // perform the questions
    err := survey.Ask(qs, &answers)
    if err != nil {
        fmt.Println(err.Error())
        return
    }

    fmt.Printf("%s chose %s.", answers.Name, answers.FavoriteColor)
}

Examples
Prompts
1. Input
2. Password
3. Confirm
4. Select
5. MultiSelect
6. Editor
Validation
1. Built-in Validators
Help Text
1. Changing the input rune
Custom Types
Customizing Output
Versioning

Examples

Examples can be found in the examples/ directory. Run them to see basic behavior:

go get github.com/tj/survey

# ... navigate to the repo in your GOPATH

go run examples/simple.go
go run examples/validation.go

Prompts

Input

name := ""
prompt := &survey.Input{
    Message: "ping",
}
survey.AskOne(prompt, &name, nil)

Password

password := ""
prompt := &survey.Password{
    Message: "Please type your password",
}
survey.AskOne(prompt, &password, nil)

Confirm

name := false
prompt := &survey.Confirm{
    Message: "Do you like pie?",
}
survey.AskOne(prompt, &name, nil)

Select

color := ""
prompt := &survey.Select{
    Message: "Choose a color:",
    Options: []string{"red", "blue", "green"},
}
survey.AskOne(prompt, &color, nil)

By default, the select prompt is limited to showing 7 options at a time and will paginate lists of options longer than that. To increase, you can either change the global survey.PageCount, or set the PageSize field on the prompt:

prompt := &survey.Select{..., PageSize: 10}

MultiSelect

days := []string{}
prompt := &survey.MultiSelect{
    Message: "What days do you prefer:",
    Options: []string{"Sunday", "Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday", "Saturday"},
}
survey.AskOne(prompt, &days, nil)

By default, the MultiSelect prompt is limited to showing 7 options at a time and will paginate lists of options longer than that. To increase, you can either change the global survey.PageCount, or set the PageSize field on the prompt:

prompt := &survey.MultiSelect{..., PageSize: 10}

Editor

Launches the user's preferred editor (defined by the $EDITOR environment variable) on a temporary file. Once the user exits their editor, the contents of the temporary file are read in as the result. If neither of those are present, notepad (on Windows) or vim (Linux or Mac) is used.

Validation

Validating individual responses for a particular question can be done by defining a Validate field on the survey.Question to be validated. This function takes an interface{} type and returns an error to show to the user, prompting them for another response:

q := &survey.Question{
    Prompt: &survey.Input{Message: "Hello world validation"},
    Validate: func (val interface{}) error {
        // since we are validating an Input, the assertion will always succeed
        if str, ok := val.(string) ; ok && len(str) > 10 {
            return errors.New("This response cannot be longer than 10 characters.")
        }
    }
}

Built-in Validators

survey comes prepackaged with a few validators to fit common situations. Currently these validators include:

name	valid types	description
Required	any	Rejects zero values of the response type
MinLength(n)	string	Enforces that a response is at least the given length
MaxLength(n)	string	Enforces that a response is no longer than the given length

Help Text

All of the prompts have a Help field which can be defined to provide more information to your users:

&survey.Input{
    Message: "What is your phone number:",
    Help:    "Phone number should include the area code",
}

Changing the input rune

In some situations, ? is a perfectly valid response. To handle this, you can change the rune that survey looks for by setting the HelpInputRune variable in survey/core:

import (
    "github.com/tj/survey"
    surveyCore "github.com/tj/survey/core"
)

number := ""
prompt := &survey.Input{
    Message: "If you have this need, please give me a reasonable message.",
    Help:    "I couldn't come up with one.",
}

surveyCore.HelpInputRune = '^'

survey.AskOne(prompt, &number, nil)

Custom Types

survey will assign prompt answers to your custom types if they implement this interface:

type settable interface {
    WriteAnswer(field string, value interface{}) error
}

Here is an example how to use them:

type MyValue struct {
    value string
}
func (my *MyValue) WriteAnswer(name string, value interface{}) error {
     my.value = value.(string)
}

myval := MyValue{}
survey.AskOne(
    &survey.Input{
        Message: "Enter something:",
    },
    &myval,
    nil,
)

Customizing Output

Customizing the icons and various parts of survey can easily be done by setting the following variables in survey/core:

name	default	description
ErrorIcon	✘	Before an error
HelpIcon	ⓘ	Before help text
QuestionIcon	?	Before the message of a prompt
SelectFocusIcon	❯	Marks the current focus in `Select` and `MultiSelect` prompts
MarkedOptionIcon	◉	Marks a chosen selection in a `MultiSelect` prompt
UnmarkedOptionIcon	◯	Marks an unselected option in a `MultiSelect` prompt

Versioning

This project tries to maintain semantic GitHub releases as closely as possible. And relies on gopkg.in to maintain those releasees. Importing v1 of survey could look something like

package main

import "github.com/tj/survey"

tj/survey