go install github.com/kisielk/errcheck@latest
errcheck requires Go 1.18 or newer.
For basic usage, just give the package path of interest as the first argument:
errcheck github.com/kisielk/errcheck/testdata
To check all packages beneath the current directory:
errcheck ./...
Or check all packages in your $GOPATH
and $GOROOT
:
errcheck all
errcheck also recognizes the following command-line options:
The -tags
flag takes a space-separated list of build tags, just like go build
. If you are using any custom build tags in your code base, you may need to specify the relevant tags here.
The -asserts
flag enables checking for ignored type assertion results. It takes no arguments.
The -blank
flag enables checking for assignments of errors to the blank identifier. It takes no arguments.
The -abspath
flag prints the absolute paths to files with unchecked errors.
The -mod
flag sets the module download mode to use: readonly
or vendor
.
The package provides Analyzer
instance that can be used with go/analysis API.
Currently supported flags are blank
, assert
, exclude
, and excludeonly
. Just as the API itself, the analyzer is experimental and may change in the future.
Use the -exclude
flag to specify a path to a file containing a list of functions to be excluded.
errcheck -exclude errcheck_excludes.txt path/to/package
The file should contain one function signature per line. The format for function signatures is package.FunctionName
while for methods it's (package.Receiver).MethodName
for value receivers and (*package.Receiver).MethodName
for pointer receivers. If the function name is followed by string of form (TYPE)
, then the the function call is excluded only if the type of the first argument is TYPE
. It also accepts a special suffix (os.Stdout)
and (os.Stderr)
, which excludes the function only when the first argument is a literal os.Stdout
or os.Stderr
.
An example of an exclude file is:
io.Copy(*bytes.Buffer) io.Copy(os.Stdout) os.ReadFile // Sometimes we don't care if a HTTP request fails. (*net/http.Client).Do
By default, the exclude list is combined with an internal list for functions in the Go standard library that have an error return type but are documented to never return an error. To disable the built-in exclude list, pass the -excludeonly
flag.
Run errcheck in -verbose
mode to see the resulting list of added excludes.
When using vendored dependencies, specify the full import path. For example:
example.com/yourpkg
example.net/fmt2
as vendor/example.net/fmt2
fmt2.Println
from error checkingIn this case, add this line to your exclude file:
example.com/yourpkg/vendor/example.net/fmt2.Println
Empty lines and lines starting with //
are ignored.
The -ignore
flag takes a comma-separated list of pairs of the form package:regex. For each package, the regex describes which functions to ignore within that package. The package may be omitted to have the regex apply to all packages.
For example, you may wish to ignore common operations like Read and Write:
errcheck -ignore '[rR]ead|[wW]rite' path/to/package
or you may wish to ignore common functions like the print
variants in fmt
:
errcheck -ignore 'fmt:[FS]?[Pp]rint*' path/to/package
The -ignorepkg
flag takes a comma-separated list of package import paths to ignore:
errcheck -ignorepkg 'fmt,encoding/binary' path/to/package
Note that this is equivalent to:
errcheck -ignore 'fmt:.*,encoding/binary:.*' path/to/package
If a regex is provided for a package pkg
via -ignore
, and pkg
also appears in the list of packages passed to -ignorepkg
, the latter takes precedence; that is, all functions within pkg
will be ignored.
Note that by default the fmt
package is ignored entirely, unless a regex is specified for it. To disable this, specify a regex that matches nothing:
errcheck -ignore 'fmt:a^' path/to/package
The -ignoretests
flag disables checking of _test.go
files. It takes no arguments.
The -ignoregenerated
flag disables checking of generated source code. It takes no arguments.
errcheck returns 1 if any problems were found in the checked files. It returns 2 if there were any other failures.
go-errcheck.el integrates errcheck with Emacs by providing a go-errcheck
command and customizable variables to automatically pass flags to errcheck.
vim-go can run errcheck via both its :GoErrCheck
and :GoMetaLinter
commands.