go - parsing templates at compile time

Question

In my understanding, go templates are parsed from a given source at runtime in order to get a compiled version of type template.Template. Then, the compiled version is executed on some data to do the actual templating.

But then I'm wondering : is it possible to parse a template at compile time ?

Answer 1

Just make them global variables like this. You'll still parse the templates at run time but it will be immediately so the binary will fail as soon as you run it if it can't parse them properly.

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "text/template"
)

var t = template.Must(template.New("name").Parse("text"))

func main() {
    fmt.Println("Template", t)
}

Answer 2

can't do it at compile time, but you can parse them at runtime before main() by parsing them inside the init function.