I recently launched a Slack app to help with channel bloat! Simply installing it would help me out a bunch. I have 2/10 installations required to submit my app to the Slack Marketplace. Thanks for helping me reach that goal.
I spent some time over the past couple of weeks porting an existing service over to Golang. Previously I had used a structured logging library for Javascript and I knew that I wanted to do the same in Go. Figuring out how to initialize Zap was surprisingly not well documented online. Possibly because most Go developers would know how to do something like that already, but for someone learning Go and writing their first project with the language, I did not think it was trivial at the time.
In the same way, main is a special function in Go, there exists a special function for each package called init. The init function for a package is run before main and is meant for (unsurprisingly) initializing anything needed by the package before it is run. My approach to handling initializing values, in particular Uber Zap, was to use the init function in conjunction with package-level variables. Here is what that might look like.
package main
import (
"go.uber.org/zap"
)
var logger *zap.Logger
func init() {
logger = zap.NewExample()
defer logger.Sync()
}
func main() {
logger.Info("Hello world")
}
Now anytime you want to log something, the logger reference exists package-wide.