Is it possible to use gofmt on templates that are designed to be used with go generate?

Question

I am using go:generate to handle automatically generating some database models and I was hoping to run my go template through gofmt, but it chokes with all the extra {{ ... }} dynamic sections.

Am I missing something obvious? I was hoping that this was a use case the gofmt people had addressed, given both gofmt and go generate are prominent parts of the go toolchain.

Obviously, it works to just run go fmt after go generate but it just feels dirty to have poorly formatted templates that are 99% go code sitting around.

Answer 1

Most generation tools execute the template to a *bytes.Buffer, format the buffer bytes using format.Source and write the result to the output file.

Given template t and output writer w, the code looks something like this:

var buf bytes.Buffer
if err := t.Execute(&buf, data); err != nil {
    // handle error
}
p, err := format.Source(buf.Bytes())
if err != nil {
    // handle error
}
w.Write(p)

Gofmting the template does not ensure that the output will be gofmted. Given how easy it is to gofmt the output using the go/format package, there's little value in creating a tool to gofmt templates.