gohawk
gohawk is an industrial-grade static analyzer that finds resource management and concurrency issues in Go code. It has been used to find and fix bugs in Docker, Kubernetes, and Caddy.
gohawk is heavily inspired by Meta's Infer and its compositional summary model. It writes a summary of what each function does with its arguments and results, such as closing a file or waiting for a goroutine, and callers read that summary instead of analyzing the function again. This lets gohawk follow a resource through helpers and across packages.
Quick Start
Download a binary from GitHub Releases
and put it on your PATH. For source builds, see installation.
# Run the conservative default set.
gohawk ./...
See every analyzer with its tier and group.
gohawk list
Inspect an analyzer or one of its checks.
gohawk doc lockorder
gohawk doc lockorder/missing-release
Use it with go vet.
go vet -vettool="$(command -v gohawk)" ./...
Run a selected analyzer, or exclude one from the defaults.
gohawk -enable=concurrentcapture ./...
gohawk -disable=concurrentcapture ./...
Run complete analyzer groups with their default checks.
gohawk -enable-groups=concurrency,resources ./...
Run one experimental check by its ID.
gohawk -enable-checks=producerlifecycle/unclosed-range ./...
Remove groups from the ordinary run or from -enable-all.
gohawk -disable-groups=concurrency ./...
Run every analyzer and check.
gohawk -enable-all ./...How gohawk compares to other analyzers
gohawk aims to complement other Go analyzers, not replace them. Deep, flow-based analysis of Go already covers several domains well. NilAway covers nil safety, gosec covers security and taint analysis, and Staticcheck covers a broad range of general bugs. gohawk primarily focuses on resource management and concurrency, which is uncovered ground.
golangci-lint integration
There is no native GolangCI lint integration (yet!), but gohawk can run as a module plugin inside a custom golangci-lint binary. See the golangci-lint integration guide for build and configuration instructions.
Contributing
Contributions are welcome. See How to contribute for the development workflow, analyzer requirements, and verification steps.
Contributors
Thanks to everyone who contributes to gohawk. This image of commit contributors is refreshed daily.
See the full contributor history.
AI policy
gohawk was developed with assistance from LLMs, and AI-assisted contributions are permitted. Contributors must disclose AI usage, and every contribution must meet the project's strict standards for quality, testing, analyzer precision, and human readability. See the full AI policy.
License
Licensed under the MIT License.