Creating cross-compiled binaries for Go projects is nothing new, and many projects build binaries for more than just linux/amd64, great. Some even build binaries for openbsd/amd64, even better.

At the time of writing there’s no Go 1.5 port for OpenBSD yet, however there are some projects which requires Go >= 1.5. E.g. filebeat.

So I made a simple Docker image which provides a cross-compiler for any supported Go target, but defaulting to openbsd/amd64: jasperla/go-cross.

Using it easy:

docker run -ti --rm -e APPNAME=myapp -e GOLANG_TARGET_PLATFORM="openbsd/amd64" \
    -v "$PWD:/go/src/app" jasperla/docker-go-cross

$APPNAME and $GOLANG_TARGET_PLATFORM are optional, defaulting to myapp and openbsd/amd64 respectively.

So to build a fresh filebeat binary:

git clone https://github.com/elastic/filebeat.git
docker run -ti --rm -e APPNAME=filebeat \
    -v "$PWD/filebeat:/go/src/app" jasperla/docker-go-cross

and a little while laters there’s a fresh filebeat-openbsd-amd64 ready and waiting.

Currently the container builds the needed toolchain when created, which does add to the run time, but allows for greater flexibility.

update: I’ve had to rename the image to jasperla/docker-go-cross in order to make it an automated build on the Docker Hub.