Capturing Go Run Output in Bash Environment Variables

By Boris Terzic on 2024-09-04

When creating test scripts for Go applications, it is often necessary to capture the output of go run in bash environment variables. This is particularly useful when the output contains information that needs to be used in subsequent commands or when the output is a success or error message that needs to be checked.

Doing a simple

FOO=$(go run main.go)

Did not work for me, the output got written to the terminal instead of being captured in the environment variable.

The program itself did the following:

package main

func main() {
	println("Hello, World!")
}

This println builtin writes to stderr, which is why the output was not captured in the environment variable.

So instead we need to do the following:

FOO=$(go run main.go 2>&1)

The 2>&1 redirects the stderr to stdout.