goversioninfo

The -64 and -arm flags default based on the GOARCH environment variable (falling back to the host architecture if GOARCH is not set).

This allows go generate to automatically produce a resource file matching your target architecture without needing to pass the flags explicitly. You can still override these defaults by passing the flags manually on the command line.

To install the goversioninfo CLI tool, run the following command:

go install github.com/josephspurrier/goversioninfo/cmd/goversioninfo@latest

To embed Windows version information, icons, and manifests into your Go executable, follow these steps:

1. Prepare Configuration: Copy testdata/resource/versioninfo.json into your working directory and modify it with your desired settings.
2. Add Generate Directive: Add a //go:generate directive to your Go source code. The -icon and -manifest flags are optional.
3. Generate and Build: Run go generate followed by go build. This creates a .syso file in the same directory as your source code, which Go will automatically embed during the build process.

Example directive:

//go:generate goversioninfo -icon=testdata/resource/icon.ico -manifest=testdata/resource/goversioninfo.exe.manifest

The VSVarFileInfo and VSVar structs handle the translation information (Language ID and Code Page) required by Windows to identify which string table to use for a specific locale.

• VSVarFileInfo: A container for the translation collection.
• VSVar: Holds the actual translation key and the uint32 value representing the language/charset identifiers.

type VSVarFileInfo struct {
	WLength      uint16
	WValueLength uint16
	WType        uint16
	SzKey        []byte
	Padding      []byte
	Value        VSVar
}

type VSVar struct {
	WLength      uint16
	WValueLength uint16
	WType        uint16
	SzKey        []byte
	Padding      []byte
	Value        uint32
}

By default, Windows uses the system default icon for the window title bar. To set a custom icon, goversioninfo embeds an icon resource with the IDI_APPLICATION resource ID (32512).

• IconPath: Sets the main application icon. If ApplicationIconPath is not set, this is also used for the window title bar.
• ApplicationIconPath: Sets a specific icon for the window title bar. If unset, it defaults to IconPath.

If neither is set, no application icon is embedded.

You can configure this in versioninfo.json or via CLI flags.

{
    "IconPath": "icons/main.ico",
    "ApplicationIconPath": "icons/small.ico"
}

The versioninfo.json file must be saved as UTF-8.

If the file is saved using a different encoding (like Windows-1252), non-ASCII characters such as the copyright symbol © will appear as ? or � in the compiled executable's file properties. This happens because Go reads the JSON as UTF-8 and replaces invalid bytes with the Unicode replacement character (U+FFFD).

Solutions:

1. Save versioninfo.json as UTF-8 in your text editor.
2. Use the JSON escape sequence (e.g., \u00a9 for ©) instead of the literal character.

To see a valid structure for a versioninfo.json file, run the CLI with the -example flag. This will print a complete JSON schema to stdout including FixedFileInfo, StringFileInfo, and VarFileInfo sections.

goversioninfo -example

Use WriteGo to generate a Go source file that embeds the version information as a raw string literal. This allows your application to access its own version metadata at runtime by unmarshaling the embedded data.

Parameters:

• filename: The destination path for the generated .go file.
• packageName: The package name to be used in the generated file (defaults to "main" if empty).

err := vi.WriteGo("version_data.go", "myapp/version")
if err != nil {
	// handle error
}