Go Development Skill

Production-grade Go development patterns for building resilient services, extracted from real-world projects including job schedulers, Docker integrations, and LDAP clients.

🔌 Compatibility

This is an Agent Skill following the open standard originally developed by Anthropic and released for cross-platform use.

Supported Platforms:

✅ Claude Code (Anthropic)
✅ Cursor
✅ GitHub Copilot
✅ Other skills-compatible AI agents

Skills are portable packages of procedural knowledge that work across any AI agent supporting the Agent Skills specification.

Features

Architecture Patterns: Package structure conventions, state mutation completeness
Cron Scheduling: go-cron patterns — named jobs, runtime updates, per-entry context, resilience wrappers, observability, FakeClock testing, bitmask parser options
Resilience Patterns: go-cron's built-in retry/circuit-breaker/timeout wrappers for scheduled jobs
Docker Integration: Optimized Docker client patterns, buffer pooling for performance, container execution patterns
LDAP Integration: Active Directory patterns, user and group management, authentication flows
Testing Strategy: Build tags for test isolation (unit/integration/e2e), race-condition and Fiber v2 test gotchas, resource isolation
Observability: Prometheus metrics integration, structured logging, error tracking

Installation

Marketplace (Recommended)

Add the Netresearch marketplace once, then browse and install skills:

# Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add netresearch/claude-code-marketplace
/plugin install go-development@netresearch-claude-code-marketplace

Without a marketplace

Since Claude Code 2.1.157 a plugin directory under your personal skills directory loads on its own:

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
git clone https://github.com/netresearch/go-development-skill.git \
  ~/.claude/skills/go-development

It loads as go-development@skills-dir on the next session. Update with git -C ~/.claude/skills/go-development pull and start a new session; remove it by deleting the directory. This route has no claude plugin update.

npx (skills.sh)

Install with any Agent Skills-compatible agent:

npx skills add https://github.com/netresearch/go-development-skill --skill go-development

Download Release

Download the latest release and extract to your agent's skills directory.

Git Clone

git clone https://github.com/netresearch/go-development-skill.git

Composer (PHP Projects)

composer require netresearch/go-development-skill

Requires netresearch/composer-agent-skill-plugin.

Usage

This skill is automatically triggered when:

Building Go services or CLI applications
Implementing job scheduling or task orchestration
Integrating with Docker API
Building LDAP/Active Directory clients
Designing resilient systems with retry logic
Setting up comprehensive test suites

Example queries:

"Create a resilient job scheduler in Go"
"Implement Docker container execution with retry logic"
"Build LDAP authentication client"
"Set up graceful shutdown for Go service"
"Implement buffer pooling for high-throughput operations"
"Create comprehensive test suite with build tags"

Structure

go-development-skill/
├── skills/go-development/
│   ├── SKILL.md                              # Skill metadata and core patterns
│   ├── checkpoints.yaml                      # Assessment checkpoints for Go projects
│   ├── evals/evals.json                      # Skill evaluation cases
│   ├── scripts/verify-go-project.sh          # Go project verification
│   └── references/
│       ├── api-design.md                     # Enum/status defensive handling
│       ├── architecture.md                   # Package structure, state mutation completeness
│       ├── awesome-go-submission.md          # Submitting a project to awesome-go
│       ├── branch-protection.md              # Branch protection standard for Go repos
│       ├── contracts-and-invariants.md       # Contracts and invariants
│       ├── cron-scheduling.md                # go-cron: named jobs, updates, context, resilience
│       ├── dependencies.md                   # Dependency upgrades
│       ├── docker.md                         # Docker client patterns
│       ├── fuzz-testing.md                   # Go fuzzing patterns, security seeds
│       ├── ldap.md                           # LDAP/Active Directory integration
│       ├── lefthook-template.md              # Lefthook git hooks for Go projects
│       ├── linting.md                        # golangci-lint v2 configuration
│       ├── logging.md                        # Structured logging with log/slog
│       ├── makefile.md                       # Standard Makefile interface
│       ├── modernization.md                  # Go 1.26 modernizers, go fix, errors.AsType
│       ├── mutation-testing.md               # Gremlins test quality measurement
│       ├── resilience.md                     # Pointer to go-cron's resilience wrappers
│       ├── reusable-workflows.md             # Reusable GitHub workflows for Go repos
│       ├── single-build-release.md           # Single-build release pipeline
│       └── testing.md                        # Build tags, race and Fiber v2 gotchas
├── Build/                                    # Plugin version check and pre-push hook
├── scripts/verify-harness.sh                 # Agent harness consistency checker
├── tests/                                    # Behavioural tests for the scripts
└── docs/ARCHITECTURE.md                      # Architecture of this repository

Expertise Areas

Architecture Patterns

Package structure conventions
State mutation completeness (avoiding partial updates)

Cron Scheduling (go-cron)

Named jobs with O(1) lookup
Runtime updates (UpsertJob, UpdateSchedule, UpdateEntry)
Per-entry context with automatic cancellation
Resilience wrappers (retry, circuit breaker, timeout)
Observability hooks (Prometheus integration)
FakeClock for deterministic testing
Missed job catch-up policies

Resilience Patterns

Retry, circuit-breaker, and timeout wrappers built into go-cron for scheduled jobs
Standard library-backed patterns (rate limiting, graceful shutdown) outside the job scheduler

Docker Integration

Optimized Docker client patterns
Buffer pooling for performance
Container execution patterns

LDAP Integration

Active Directory patterns
User and group management
Authentication flows

Testing Strategy

Build tags for test isolation (unit/integration/e2e)
Race-condition gotchas and fixes
Resource isolation (one instance per test)
Fiber v2 test patterns

Running Go Tests

The test commands the skill recommends for Go projects:

# Unit tests only (default)
go test ./...

# With integration tests
go test -tags=integration ./...

# Full suite including E2E
go test -tags=e2e ./...

# With race detector
go test -race ./...

# With coverage
go test -coverprofile=coverage.out ./...
go tool cover -html=coverage.out

Quality Gates

Recommended Tooling

.PHONY: dev-check
dev-check: fmt vet lint security test

fmt:
	gofmt -w $(shell git ls-files '*.go')
	gci write .

vet:
	go vet ./...

lint:
	golangci-lint run --timeout 5m

security:
	gosec ./...
	gitleaks detect

test:
	go test -race ./...

Related Skills

This skill focuses on Go code patterns and quality. For complete project setup:

Skill	Purpose
`github-project`	Repository setup, branch protection, auto-merge workflows
`enterprise-readiness`	OpenSSF Scorecard, SLSA provenance, signed releases
`security-audit`	OWASP Top 10, CVE analysis, security hardening

Tests

This section is about the tests of this repository; the Go test commands above are what the skill recommends for Go projects. The behavioural tests live in tests/ and run offline; they need bash, git, python3 and the usual coreutils, find, grep, sed and awk. No Go toolchain is needed:

bash tests/verify-go-project.sh    # skills/go-development/scripts/verify-go-project.sh
bash tests/check-plugin-version.sh # Build/Scripts/check-plugin-version.sh and Build/hooks/pre-push

tests/verify-go-project.sh runs the verifier against fixture projects with a stub go on PATH that records where go vet ran and exits with a chosen status, or with no go on PATH at all. It checks the exit codes, that every section runs after a failed item, the error and warning counts, and that a relative project path is resolved correctly.
tests/check-plugin-version.sh builds throwaway git repositories and checks that a semver tag at HEAD must match the version in .claude-plugin/plugin.json, and that the pre-push hook passes the result on.

Each check prints ok or FAIL; a FAIL line names the expectation that was not met and is followed by the script's output. A test file exits 1 when any check failed. In CI, the Skill Tests workflow (.github/workflows/tests.yml) runs every tests/**/*.sh on each pull request and on pushes to main, and fails when the repository ships scripts under skills/*/scripts/ but no test ran.

scripts/verify-harness.sh has no test of its own; on pull requests, Harness Verification (harness-verify.yml) checks AGENTS.md (presence, length, links, documented commands) and docs/ARCHITECTURE.md with its own steps. The skill's Markdown is not executed here; Skill Validation and Eval Validation check its structure and the eval definitions in skills/go-development/evals/evals.json. A pull request that adds or changes behaviour in a script adds or updates a check in tests/ that fails without the change.

Governance and policies

This repository follows the Netresearch organisation policies:

Governance: ownership, roles, how decisions are made and disputes resolved, and continuity.
Roadmap: planned and explicitly excluded work for the coming year.
Handling of dependency and code analysis findings: thresholds, deadlines and the exception process for dependency (SCA) and static analysis (SAST) findings.
Secret management: how CI and release credentials are stored, accessed and rotated.
Access roster: who holds administrative access to this repository and the organisation.

The security assurance case for this skill (threat model, trust boundaries, countermeasures and limits) is in docs/SECURITY-ASSURANCE.md.

Checks that run on pull requests in this repository:

Every pull request: Skill Validation (lint.yml: skill structure, markdownlint, yamllint, actionlint, JSON syntax, ShellCheck, ruff, checkpoint schema), Eval Validation (eval-validate.yml) and Skill Tests (tests.yml).
Pull requests to main: security.yml with Betterleaks (secret scanning), zizmor (workflow static analysis), dependency review, Composer Audit and Opengrep SAST (both behind a preflight event-gate job); Harness Verification (harness-verify.yml) and Template Drift (check-template-drift.yml). The organisation's security policy sets when dependency review and Opengrep fail: see dependencies and static analysis (SAST).
Also on every pull request: Labeler (labeler.yml), the DCO sign-off check, SonarCloud Code Analysis and the CodeRabbit review status (GitHub Apps) and, for dependency-update pull requests, auto-merge (auto-merge-deps.yml). CodeQL for actions runs through GitHub's default setup.

License

This project uses split licensing:

Code (scripts, workflows, configs): MIT
Content (skill definitions, documentation, references): CC-BY-SA-4.0

See the individual license files for full terms.

Credits

Developed and maintained by Netresearch DTT GmbH.

Made with ❤️ for Open Source by Netresearch