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In Python I often use the __file__ constant to get the directory of the current file (e.g., os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__))). While writing a Go app recently, I found that there wasn’t an immediately obvious (or searchable, even with “golang”) equivalent.

But in the annals of the golong-nuts mailing list I eventually found out about runtime.Caller(). This returns a few details about the current goroutine’s stack, including the file path.

The context of my problem was opening a data file in a shared package. What I cooked up was:

1	_, filename, _, _ := runtime.Caller(1)
2	f, err := os.Open(path.Join(path.Dir(filename), "data.csv"))

view raw gistfile1.go hosted with by GitHub

Sending 1 to runtime.Caller identifies the caller of runtime.Caller as the stack frame to return details about. So you you get info about the file your method is in. Check the docs for more in-depth coverage.

It’s not quite as elegant as __file__ but it works.

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