How to reliably detect os/platform in Go

Solution 1:

Detection at compile time

If you're doing this to have different implementations depending on the OS, it is more useful to have separate files with the implementation of that feature and add build tags to each of the files. This is used in many places in the standard library, for example in the os package.

These so-called "Build constraints" or "Build tags" are explained here.

Say you have the constant PATH_SEPARATOR and you want that platform-dependent, you would make two files, one for Windows and one for the (UNIX) rest:

/project/path_windows.go
/project/path_unix.go

The code of these files would then be:

path_windows.go

// +build windows

package project

const PATH_SEPARATOR = '\\'

path_unix.go

// +build !windows

package project

const PATH_SEPARATOR = '/'

You can now access PATH_SEPARATOR in your code and have it platform dependant.

Detection at runtime

If you want to determine the operating system at runtime, use the runtime.GOOS variable:

if runtime.GOOS == "windows" {
    fmt.Println("Hello from Windows")
}

While this is compiled into the runtime and therefore ignores the environment, you can nevertheless be relatively certain that the value is correct. The reason for this is that every platform that is worth distinguishing needs rebuilding due to different executable formats and thus has a new GOOS value.

Solution 2:

Have you looked at the runtime package? It has a GOOS const: http://golang.org/pkg/runtime/#pkg-constants

Solution 3:

I just stumbled on this looking for something else and noticed the age of this post so I'll add a more updated addition. If you're just trying to handle the correct filepath I would use filepath.Join(). Its takes all of the guesswork out of os issues. If there is more you need, other than just filepath, using the runtime constants (runtime.GOOS & runtime.GOARCH) are the way to go: playground example