golint

The golint tool is marked as deprecated on GitHub.

Tools

The golint docs recommend the following:

Static check

Install globally:

$ go install honnef.co/go/tools/cmd/staticcheck@latest

Or in a project:

$ go go honnef.co/go/tools/cmd/staticcheck@latest

The downside for the second approach is that you’ll get a warning in go.mod from your IDE that the package is unused. And running go mod tidy remove it. I don’t know how to add it to dev dependencies or stop it getting removed. Maybe just have it as a global dependency in a project. See my Makefile of go-project-template.

Check current package.

$ staticcheck .

Check all packages.

$ staticcheck ./...

Explain:

$ staticcheck -explain <check>

e.g. after seeing foo.go:1248:4: unnecessary use of fmt.Sprintf (S1039), you would run:

$ staticcheck -explain S1039

Go vet

This works with no arguments. Or supply packages.

$ go vet
$ go vet .
$ go vet ./...

Help:

$ go help vet

$ go doc cmd/vet