allowtags

README

AllowTags

AllowTags is a golang linter that checks all tags on struct fields have keys matching one of the given set. Also does some validation of tag formatting.

AllowTags provides more peace of mind when working with struct tags, especially since the golang compiler won't report misspellings.

Installing

AllowTags is provided as a go module and can be installed by running go install github.com/ashmrtn/allowtags@latest

Running

AllowTags uses a similar front-end to go vet. You can run AllowTags by executing allowtags --allow-key key1 --allow-key key2 <packages> after installation. You can pass multiple packages to AllowTags by using the ... expression, just like you would with other tools. For example, to check your whole project with AllowTags just run allowtags --allow-key key1 ./....

Flags

AllowTags requires all tags that it allows be explicitly given. To specify multiple tag keys pass the --allow-key flag multiple times, each time with a different tag key.

Limitations

AllowTags uses a different parsing method than govet and the golang standard library's tag parser. This means it may give different error messages compared to govet and the standard library when run on malformed tags. However, AllowTags is built to be fairly lenient when parsing tags and attempts to find key-value pairs where possible.

The rules that AllowTags parses by are loosely derived from documentation in the golang standard library reflect package empirical testing of the standard library's behavior, and the idea of trying to find key-value pairs where possible even if the tag is not formatted as expected.