messgo

Catch maintainability problems in Go before they calcify: oversized functions and types, tangled dependencies, dead private code, muddy naming, and other mess that reviews keep rediscovering.

messgo is a local CLI. It parses Go with the standard-library go/ast, never builds or runs your project, and needs no project dependencies installed. Go 1.26+.

Quick start

go install github.com/quality-gates/messgo/cmd/messgo@latest
messgo ./... text go --ignore-tests

That scans the module with the recommended low-noise policy and prints findings on stdout. Exit 0 is clean, 2 means findings, 1 means the tool failed, 3 means a source file failed to parse.

Common next steps:

messgo ./... text go,opinionated --ignore-tests
messgo ./... sarif go --ignore-tests --reportfile reports/messgo.sarif
messgo ./... github go --ignore-tests

Directory inputs analyze only the files that build for the host platform, honouring //go:build lines and _GOOS/_GOARCH filename suffixes. A file named explicitly is always analyzed.

Full command syntax, options, and discovery: docs/usage.md. What each ruleset and rule checks: docs/rules.md.

Install

go install github.com/quality-gates/messgo/cmd/messgo@latest
messgo --version

From a local checkout:

go build -o messgo ./cmd/messgo

Stable macOS archives: GitHub Releases. Homebrew: brew install quality-gates/tap/messgo.

Tune the gate

Start with go. Add opinionated when you want the stricter checks the recommended set leaves out. Add explicitness (or explicitness-strict) to find functions with implicit inputs and outputs. Point at a custom XML ruleset when thresholds or membership need to live in the repo:

<ruleset name="team policy">
  <exclude-pattern>*/gen/*</exclude-pattern>
  <rule ref="go">
    <exclude name="DevelopmentCodeFragment" />
  </rule>
  <rule ref="LongVariable">
    <priority>2</priority>
    <properties>
      <property name="maximum" value="50" />
    </properties>
  </rule>
</ruleset>

messgo ./... text path/to/team-policy.xml --ignore-tests

Existing phpmd rulesets carry over: rulesets/codesize.xml and rulesets/naming.xml/LongVariable resolve to the built-in sets unless a real file exists at that path.

Suppress one intentional exception

messgo has no per-line disable comment yet. Drop a rule for the whole run with --disable, skip paths with --exclude, or encode the exception in a team ruleset:

<rule ref="go">
  <exclude name="RuleName" />
</rule>

--strict is reserved for when source suppressions land; today it does not change the report.

Drop it into CI

# GitHub Actions
- uses: actions/setup-go@v6
  with:
    go-version-file: go.mod
- run: go install github.com/quality-gates/messgo/cmd/messgo@latest
- run: messgo ./... github go --ignore-tests

# GitLab Code Quality
script: messgo ./... gitlab go --reportfile gl-code-quality-report.json
artifacts:
  reports:
    codequality: gl-code-quality-report.json

This repository also self-checks after building the binary. A finding fails the job with exit code 2.

Maintainers

Command reference: docs/usage.md. Rulesets: docs/rules.md. Homebrew release path: docs/homebrew-release.md. Exploratory testing: 2026-09-19 CLI journeys, 2026-09-23 explicitness rulesets, 2026-09-26 rules and metrics, 2026-10-03 type semantics and metrics.

Development checks:

go test ./...