🔔 Prelude: This is my first step into building an open‑source style CLI tool in Go.

Release 0.1

Project Description

For this assignment, I built a “Repository Context Packager” tool named repo2context, which can scan a local git repository and generate a single, well-structured text file with repository information optimized for sending to LLMs such as ChatGPT and Gemini.

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:

      toolname . --output context.md
# usually the toolname is "r2c" but can be built as other names

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