Gox - Simple Go Cross Compilation

Gox is a simple, no-frills tool for Go cross compilation that behaves a lot like standard go build. Gox will parallelize builds for multiple platforms. Gox will also build the cross-compilation toolchain for you.

Installation

To install Gox, please use go get. We tag versions so feel free to checkout that tag and compile.

$ go get github.com/mitchellh/gox
...
$ gox -h
...

Usage

Before you use Gox, you must build the cross-compilation toolchain. Gox can do this for you. This only has to be done once (or whenever you update Go):

$ gox -build-toolchain
...

Once that is done, you're ready to cross compile!

If you know how to use go build, then you know how to use Gox. For example, to build the current package, specify no parameters and just call gox. Gox will parallelize based on the number of CPUs you have by default and build for every platform by default:

$ gox
Number of parallel builds: 4

-->      darwin/386: github.com/mitchellh/gox
-->    darwin/amd64: github.com/mitchellh/gox
-->       linux/386: github.com/mitchellh/gox
-->     linux/amd64: github.com/mitchellh/gox
-->       linux/arm: github.com/mitchellh/gox
-->     freebsd/386: github.com/mitchellh/gox
-->   freebsd/amd64: github.com/mitchellh/gox
-->     openbsd/386: github.com/mitchellh/gox
-->   openbsd/amd64: github.com/mitchellh/gox
-->     windows/386: github.com/mitchellh/gox
-->   windows/amd64: github.com/mitchellh/gox
-->     freebsd/arm: github.com/mitchellh/gox
-->      netbsd/386: github.com/mitchellh/gox
-->    netbsd/amd64: github.com/mitchellh/gox
-->      netbsd/arm: github.com/mitchellh/gox
-->       plan9/386: github.com/mitchellh/gox

Or, if you want to build a package and sub-packages:

$ gox ./...
...

Or, if you want to build multiple distinct packages:

$ gox github.com/mitchellh/gox github.com/hashicorp/serf
...

Or if you want to just build for linux:

$ gox -os="linux"
...

Or maybe you just want to build for 64-bit linux:

$ gox -osarch="linux/amd64"
...

And more! Just run gox -h for help and additional information.

Versus Other Cross-Compile Tools

A big thanks to these other options for existing. They each paved the way in many aspects to make Go cross-compilation approachable.

• Dave Cheney's golang-crosscompile - Gox compiles for multiple platforms and can therefore easily run on any platform Go supports, whereas Dave's scripts require a shell. Gox will also parallelize builds. Dave's scripts build sequentially. Gox has much easier to use OS/Arch filtering built in.

• goxc - A very richly featured tool that can even do things such as build system packages, upload binaries, generate download webpages, etc. Gox is a super slim alternative that only cross-compiles binaries. Gox builds packages in parallel, whereas goxc doesn't. Gox doesn't enforce a specific output structure for built binaries.