Go Tools - Running custom analysis passes with `go vet`

These tips and tricks are extracted and expanded from my work notes, and are meant to serve more as a reference for me, than as a true standalone blog post with a full narrative structure and whatnot.

Sometimes, you just want to run an analysis pass that isn’t available by default in your local go vet.

In my case, the nilness pass wasn’t enabled by default for my local Golang tooling, but was enabled in my editor’s Go linter tooling, leading to warnings that I couldn’t investigate without firing up an IDE.

I did some digging, and realized that I could manually invoke the analysis pass, with some careful CLI hackery:

go install golang.org/x/tools/go/analysis/passes/nilness/cmd/nilness@latest 
go vet -vettool $(which nilness) ./...