Release 0.1

Project Description

Technology Choice

• Language: Go (Golang)

• Output format: Markdown

• Why Go?: Although many people are talking about Go’s advantages all the time, my main reason to do this was simply that I wanted to challenge myself.

Implemented Features

Required Features

• Basic CLI interface with --help and --version

• Repository/file analysis

• Path tree structure

• Git commit/branch metadata

• Summary statistics (file count, lines of code)

• Standard streams (stdout for output, stderr for errors)

• Error handling

Optional Features Implemented

1. Gitignore Integration
• The tool automatically excludes files and directories listed in .gitignore.
• Provide a --no-gitignore to disable .gitignore filtering

2. Output to File (-o / --output)
• Users can save the formatted repository context into a file (markdown text).
• Example:

Development Experience

Process

1. Set up GitHub repository

2. Implement CLI argument parsing in Go (with cobra package)

3. Add recursive directory/file reading; Implement project structure tree displaying; tests…

4. Extract Git info (os/exec to run git commands and parse metadata)

5. Get data together and format output

6. Implement the two optional features: .gitignore handling + output to file

7. Also invite classmates to file issues

Challenges

• Git env: Needed to handle different situations like Git may not be available or the repo may not be initialized. (To be honest, I found this type of check should be applied to basically everywhere, and that’s a bit painful handling errors in Go..)

• Starting from scratch: This was my first time writing a full CLI tool in Go, so I had to set up everything from zero — project structure, flags, Git integration, error handling, etc. (Have to do a lot of research)

Learnings

• Learned how to build a demo project from 0 to 0.1 in Go.

• Gained experience reading Git metadata and filtering files dynamically.

• Deepened understanding of how to do file system traversal, file I/O and error handling in Go.

Summary

• Implemented all required features

• Completed 2 optional features

• A not bad foundation for future extensions

• Good start for practicing open-source contribution process

Links

• GitHub Repository: https://github.com/BHChen24/repo2context/