Build Go Binary without CGO

This is a test to solve a problem I was having when working with sqlite with golang. The widely used mattn/go-sqlite3 package complies sqlite from c source code and links the go binary against it. This is done using cgo and will link against the c stdlib. Therefore it will only run on systems with glibc, musl, or other implementations installed.

The following example will not work:

FROM alpine
COPY ./binary ./
CMD ./binary

because we still need to install the c stdlib:

RUN apk add gcompat

Pure Go Solution

As I am aiming for a statically linked binary without external dependencies we need to stop linking against libc. The solution is to use pure go implementations of sqlite. These reimplement sqlite from scratch in golang.

I use glebarez/go-sqlite.

However initially I was getting the same error. I was still missing libc.

I realized, that there were some tests, that were using cgo in that package. It has no impact on the package we use, but are still seen by the compiler. Therefore we need to prevent CGO from being used at all.

In the compilations step we need to set CGO_ENABLED to 0.

RUN CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -o binary .