Installing

There are many installation methods available for gomplate, depending on your platform and use-case.

macOS/Linux with homebrew

The simplest method for macOS and Linux is to use homebrew:

$ brew install gomplate
...

==> Installing gomplate
==> Pouring gomplate-3.8.0.x86_64_linux.bottle.tar.gz
🍺  /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/Cellar/gomplate/3.8.0: 6 files, 7.8MB

Alpine Linux

gomplate is available in Alpine’s community repository.

$ apk add --no-cache gomplate
...

Note: the Alpine version of gomplate may lag behind the latest release of gomplate.

use with Docker

A simple way to get started is with one of the hairyhenderson/gomplate Docker images. Images containing slim binaries are tagged as :slim or :vX.Y.Z-slim.

$ docker run hairyhenderson/gomplate --version

Of course, there are some drawbacks - any files to be used for [datasources][] must be mounted and any environment variables to be used must be passed through:

$ echo 'My voice is my {{.Env.THING}}. {{(datasource "vault").value}}' \
  | docker run -i -e THING=passport -v /home/me/.vault-token:/root/.vault-token hairyhenderson/gomplate -d vault=vault:///secret/sneakers -f -
My voice is my passport. Verify me.

It can be pretty awkward to always type docker run hairyhenderson/gomplate, so this can be made simpler with a shell alias:

$ alias gomplate=docker run hairyhenderson/gomplate
$ gomplate --version
gomplate version 3.8.0

use inside a container

gomplate is often used inside Docker containers. When building images with Docker 17.05 or higher, you can use multi-stage builds to easily include the gomplate binary in your container images.

Use the COPY instruction’s --from flag to accomplish this:

...
COPY --from=hairyhenderson/gomplate:v3.8.0 /gomplate /bin/gomplate

Now, gomplate will be available in the /bin directory inside the container image.

Note that when using gomplate with HTTPS-based datasources, you will likely need to install the ca-certificates package for your base distribution. Here’s an example when using the alpine base image:

FROM alpine

COPY --from=hairyhenderson/gomplate:v3.8.0-slim /gomplate /bin/gomplate
RUN apk add --no-cache ca-certificates

manual install

  1. Get the latest gomplate for your platform from the releases page
  2. Store the downloaded binary somewhere in your path as gomplate (or gomplate.exe on Windows)
  3. Make sure it’s executable (on Linux/macOS)
  4. Test it out with gomplate --help!

In other words:

$ curl -o /usr/local/bin/gomplate -sSL https://github.com/hairyhenderson/gomplate/releases/download/<version>/gomplate_<os>-<arch>
$ chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/gomplate
$ gomplate --help
...

install with go get

If you’re a Go developer, sometimes it’s faster to just use go get to install gomplate:

$ go get github.com/hairyhenderson/gomplate/v3/cmd/gomplate
$ gomplate --help
...

(note that this method produces a binary that isn’t versioned and may not necessarily work correctly)

install with npm

For some users, especially Node.js developers, using npm may be a natural fit. Even though gomplate is written in Go and not Node.js, it can still be installed with npm:

$ npm install -g gomplate
...

Slim binaries

As a convenience, self-extracting compressed gomplate binaries are available from the releases page. These are named with -slim as a suffix (or -slim.exe). They are compressed with UPX.

Generally, these binaries are ~5x smaller than the regular ones, but are otherwise exactly the same.

There are a few reasons that a regular binary is also distributed: - UPX lacks support for some platforms - there’s a very slight chance that the slim binary could exhibit some form of bug related to being compressed - there could be environments where self-extracting compressed executables are disallowed