Custom Binaries to Ease Onboarding Using Go

It recently came up that I needed to release a helper tool for our work environment. I was limited with regards to my distribution methods since much of the user base is BYOD based. Having Go in my toolbox, I knew that I could use Go to ease the distribution. One of Go’s selling points is its ability to package up all of its dependencies and runtime at compile time, so that you can avoid the runtime dependencies management issues that often arise.

In this case, the executable I built required a lot of configuration information—our list of compute clusters, the authentication endpoint, and an authentication client ID (OAuth 2 based)—so I wrote up and released the documentation on how a user can configure the tool for our environment.