golangci-lint

golangci-lint is a fast Go linters runner that aggregates and runs multiple Go static analysis tools (linters) in parallel, providing a unified interface for code quality enforcement in Go projects. Created by the golangci team and actively maintained by the open-source community, it has become the standard linting tool for Go, adopted by major projects including Kubernetes, Docker, HashiCorp tools, and thousands of other Go repositories. The tool is designed as a drop-in replacement for running individual linters separately: instead of installing, configuring, and running each linter individually, golangci-lint bundles over 80 linters into a single binary and runs them concurrently with shared caching for maximum performance. Key features include: parallel execution of all enabled linters (typically completing in a fraction of the time it would take to run each linter serially), shared type information caching (parsing and type-checking the codebase only once and sharing the results across all linters, eliminating redundant work), over 80 built-in linters covering areas including code correctness (errcheck, govet, staticcheck), style and formatting (gofmt, goimports, gocritic), performance (prealloc, fast reflective calls), security (gosec), unused code detection (unused, deadcode, structcheck), complexity (gocyclo, nestif, funlen), and modernization (the ability to suggest more idiomatic Go patterns), configurable linter enablement and disablement via the .golangci.yml configuration file, custom linter integration via Go plugins, issue filtering and exclusion rules (file-based, path-based, and text-based exclusions), integration with all major CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, Jenkins), cache persistence between runs for incremental analysis, and support for both Go modules and legacy GOPATH projects. As of 2026, golangci-lint has over 16,000 GitHub stars.