📖 3 min read (~ 700 words).

Coding Style

Coding style at go-openapi

TL;DR

Let’s be honest: at go-openapi and go-swagger we’ve never been super-strict on code style and linting.

But perhaps now (2025) is the time to adopt a different stance.

Even though our repos have been early adopters of golangci-lint years ago (we used some other metalinter before), our decade-old codebase is only realigned to new rules from time to time.

Now go-openapi and go-swagger together make up a really large codebase, which is taxing to maintain and keep afloat.

Code quality and the harmonization of rules have thus become things that we need now.

Meta-linter

Universally formatted go code promotes ease of writing, reading, and maintenance.

You should run golangci-lint run before committing your changes.

Many editors have plugins that do that automatically.

We use the golangci-lint meta-linter. The configuration lies in .golangci.yml. You may read the linter’s configuration reference for additional reference.

Linting rules posture

Thanks to go’s original design, we developers don’t have to waste much time arguing about code figures of style.

However, the number of available linters has been growing to the point that we need to pick a choice.

We enable all linters published by golangci-lint by default, then disable a few ones.

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Here are the reasons why they are disabled (update: Nov. 2025, golangci-lint v2.6.1).

  disable:
    - depguard              # we don't want to configure rules to constrain import. That's the reviewer's job
    - exhaustruct           # we don't want to configure regexp's to check type name. That's the reviewer's job
    - funlen                # we accept cognitive complexity as a meaningful metric, but function length is relevant
    - godox                 # we don't see any value in forbidding TODO's etc in code
    - nlreturn              # we usually apply this "blank line" rule to make code less compact. We just don't want to enforce it
    - nonamedreturns        # we don't see any valid reason why we couldn't used named returns
    - noinlineerr           # there is no value added forbidding inlined err
    - paralleltest          # we like parallel tests. We just don't want them to be enforced everywhere
    - recvcheck             # we like the idea of having pointer and non-pointer receivers
    - testpackage           # we like test packages. We just don't want them to be enforced everywhere
    - tparallel             # see paralleltest
    - varnamelen            # sometimes, we like short variables. The linter doesn't catch cases when a short name is good
    - whitespace            # no added value
    - wrapcheck             # although there is some sense with this linter's general idea, it produces too much noise
    - wsl                   # no added value. Noise
    - wsl_v5                # no added value. Noise

As you may see, we agree with the objective of most linters, at least the principle they are supposed to enforce. But all linters do not support fine-grained tuning to tolerate some cases and not some others.

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When this is possible, we enable linters with relaxed constraints.

  settings:
    dupl:
      threshold: 200        # in a older code base such as ours, we have to be tolerant with a little redundancy
                            # Hopefully, we'll be able to gradually get rid of those.
    goconst:
      min-len: 2
      min-occurrences: 3
    cyclop:
      max-complexity: 20    # the default is too low for most of our functions. 20 is a nicer trade-off
    gocyclo:
      min-complexity: 20
    exhaustive:             # when using default in switch, this should be good enough
      default-signifies-exhaustive: true
      default-case-required: true
    lll:
      line-length: 180      # we just want to avoid extremely long lines.
                            # It is no big deal if a line or two don't fit on your terminal.

Final note: since we have switched to a forked version of stretchr/testify, we no longer benefit from the great testifylint linter for tests.