Update globally installed go binaries.

The missing go command similar to npm -g update or cargo install-update.

• Requirements
• Installation
• Usage
• Upgrading go-global-update
• Troubleshooting
• How it works
• Alternative tools
• Contributing

• Go 1.16 or higher

go install github.com/Gelio/go-global-update@latest

Running

go-global-update

will print information about currently installed global binaries and attempt to upgrade those that have newer versions.

You can also do a dry run without update the binaries:

go-global-update --dry-run

or update just a handful of binaries:

go-global-update gofumpt

For more information, see

go-global-update --help

go-global-update will take care of updating itself when it updates other binaries.

Do you have problems updating some binaries using go-global-update? Take a look at TROUBLESHOOTING.md for more information.

go-global-update consists of the following steps:

1. Determine binaries to inspect.

   Either use the list of provided arguments or all executables installed in your go env GOBIN (or $(go env GOPATH)/bin).

2. Inspect where each executable came from (by running go version -m [executable name] and checking the path),

3. Check the latest version for each binary using go list -m -f "{{.Version}}" [path]

4. If the binary has a newer version, run go install [package path]@latest to update it.

go-global-update is not the only tool trying to solve the problem of updating globally-installed go binaries. The alternatives are:

• gup

  Advantages:

  • includes desktop notifications
  • has a subcommand to remove a binary
  • has a way to export/import a list of binaries

  Disadvantages:

  • does not offer troubleshooting information when an upgrade fails
  • does not report error logs from failed updates
  • updates binaries installed from source (potentially overwrites locally-made changes)

• binstale

  Disadvantages:

  • seems not to detect globally-installed binaries using go modules

    $ binstale
    binstale
         (no source package found)
    go-global-update
         stale: github.com/Gelio/go-global-update (stale dependency: github.com/Gelio/go-global-update/internal/colors)
    gofumpt
         (no source package found)
    gotop
         (no source package found)
    misspell
         (no source package found)
    shfmt

Contributions are welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md for more information.