Very recently Golang 1.6 was announced. There is a tweak to the templating engine that I’m pretty happy about and I think you should be too. Here’s why.

whitespace

Our old friend whitespace rears its ugly head when we go to work with Golang templates. “Back in the day” when I was developing an application for the web we would use the Smarty templating Engine to spit out HTML. It was glorious – because of the way that browser rendering works, you didn’t need to concern yourself with extraneous whitespace, and so you could layout your rendering of back-end data with quite a bit of flourish, like this:

<table>
{foreach $names as $name}
{strip}
   <tr bgcolor="{cycle values="#eeeeee,#dddddd"}">
      <td>{$name}</td>
   </tr>
{/strip}
{/foreach}
</table>

Unfortunately, lots of other environments do care about whitespace, including your friendly neighborhood shell. Therefore, it’s useful to have more fine grained control over how whitespace is rendered in templates.

example

Let’s say we wanted to render a command to start the Docker daemon with certain parameters using Go templating, our first attempt might look something like this:

package main

import (
	"log"
	"os"

	"text/template"
)

type EngineOptions struct {
	StorageDriver        string
	ClusterStore, Labels []string
}

func main() {
	engineOpts := &EngineOptions{
		StorageDriver: "overlay",
		ClusterStore: []string{
			"zk://10.0.0.2:2181",
			"eth0:2376",
		},
		Labels: []string{
			"storage=ssd",
			"distro=debian",
			"region=us-west-1",
			"instance-type=m1.medium",
		},
	}

	// Bad code: Doesn't give us what we actually want.
	tmpl, err := template.New("test").Parse(`docker daemon \
--debug \
{{ range .ClusterStore }}
--cluster-store {{.}} \
{{ end }}
{{ range .Labels }}
--label {{.}} \
{{ end }}
--storage-driver {{.StorageDriver}}
`)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}

	if err = tmpl.Execute(os.Stdout, engineOpts); err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
}

But unfortunately, running this code will give us a lot of extra whitespace, that a shell actually would be sensitive to:

Prior to Go 1.6, one would have to re-write the template to actually carefully manage the whitespace, but in 1.6:

it is now possible to trim spaces around template actions, which can make template definitions more readable. A minus sign at the beginning of an action says to trim space before the action, and a minus sign at the end of an action says to trim space after the action.

So, we could re-write our above template like so:

	tmpl, err := template.New("test").Parse(`docker daemon \
--debug \
{{- range .ClusterStore }}
--cluster-store {{.}} \
{{- end }}
{{- range .Labels }}
--label {{.}} \
{{- end }}
--storage-driver {{.StorageDriver}}
`)

(from https://tip.golang.org/doc/go1.6)

This gives us a rendering which is much more airtight:

fin

Go 1.6 authors == <3

Until next time, stay sassy Internet.

• Nate