Building a Production-Ready CLI Tool with Go: From Zero to Distribution

Every developer has that moment: you write a quick script to check whether your APIs are alive, and six months later the whole team depends on it. The script grows flags, gains config files, and suddenly you're maintaining a tool that deserves proper packaging. If you've been there, Go is arguably the best language to rebuild it in. In this tutorial, we'll build healthcheck -- a CLI tool that monitors API health endpoints, reports status, and exits with appropriate codes for CI/CD integration. Along the way, we'll cover project scaffolding with Cobra, configuration management with Viper, testing strategies, and distribution through GoReleaser and Homebrew. By the end, you'll have a repeatable playbook for shipping any CLI tool to production. Why Go for CLI Tools Before writing a single line of code, it's worth understanding why Go has become the de facto language for CLI tools. Tools like kubectl, docker, gh, terraform, and hugo are all written in Go, and that's no coincidence. Single