go-project-dump 🚀

Pack an entire codebase into a single file — ready to paste into an LLM.

go-project-dump walks one or more project directories, skips the noise (.gitignore, node_modules, binaries, build artifacts), detects the technologies in use, and writes everything to one clean file with an estimated token count so you know whether it fits your model's context window. A single static Go binary, zero external dependencies.

Great for feeding code to Claude / ChatGPT, code reviews, documentation, onboarding, and archiving a snapshot of a project.

✨ Features

• 🤖 LLM-first — estimated token count up front, plus an xml output mode optimized for models that parse structured context well.
• 🧾 Respects .gitignore — honours your project's ignore rules out of the box (disable with --no-gitignore), on top of sensible built-in excludes.
• 🗂️ Multi-project — pass several paths to dump a whole microservices repo into one file with a combined summary and per-project breakdown.
• 🎛️ Precise control — --include / --exclude globs, --max-size, and a --stats mode that prints just the summary.
• 🔍 Technology detection — identifies 15+ technologies (Go, TypeScript, Python, React, Docker, …) with confidence scores.
• 🌳 Directory tree + syntax highlighting in the Markdown output.
• ⚡ Fast, single binary, no dependencies.

🚀 Installation

Install with Go (1.21+):

go install github.com/hsdfat/go-project-dump@latest

Or clone and build:

git clone https://github.com/hsdfat/go-project-dump.git
cd go-project-dump
go build -o go-project-dump .

⚡ Quick start

# Dump the current directory to stdout (Markdown)
go-project-dump .

# Write to a file
go-project-dump . -o dump.md

# Build LLM context from just your Go sources, minus tests
go-project-dump . --include '*.go' --exclude '*_test.go' -o context.md

# XML output, tuned for pasting into an LLM
go-project-dump . --format xml -o context.xml

# Two services into one combined file
go-project-dump ./frontend ./backend -o fullstack.md

# Just the numbers (files, size, estimated tokens) — no source
go-project-dump . --stats

Flags may appear before, after, or between paths.

🎛️ Command-line reference

Usage:
  go-project-dump [flags] <project-path> [more-paths...]

Flags:
  -o, --output <file>    write output to a file (default: stdout)
  -f, --format <fmt>     markdown (default) | xml | text
      --max-size <size>  skip files larger than this (default 1MB; e.g. 500KB, 2MB, 0=off)
      --no-gitignore     do not honour each project's .gitignore
      --exclude <glob>   extra ignore glob, repeatable (e.g. --exclude '*.min.js')
      --include <glob>   only include files matching this glob, repeatable
      --stats            print only the summary (files, size, tokens)
      --version          print version and exit

📦 Output formats

Format	Flag	Best for
markdown	(default)	Human-readable reviews, docs, GitHub
xml	--format xml	Feeding to LLMs — file boundaries are unambiguous tags, contents wrapped in CDATA
text	--format text	Minimal, greppable, smallest token overhead

🚫 What gets filtered

Files are included unless they match one of these:

1. .gitignore rules in each project root (unless --no-gitignore).
2. Built-in directory excludes: node_modules, vendor, .git, dist, build, target, __pycache__, .idea, .vscode, and more.
3. Binary / media / archive extensions (.exe, .png, .zip, .pdf, …) and any file containing null bytes.
4. Size limit — files larger than --max-size (default 1 MB; 0 disables).
5. --exclude globs, then --include globs (if --include is set, only matching files are kept).

Unreadable files are skipped with a warning rather than aborting the run.

🔢 Token estimation

The summary reports an estimated token count using the common ~4-characters- per-token heuristic, which tracks closely with the tokenizers used by Claude and GPT-family models for source code. It is meant to tell you whether a dump fits in a context window — not to be billed against.

🧪 Example

$ go-project-dump . --include '*.go' --stats
# go-project-dump Analysis

**Generated on:** 2026-07-18 14:04:04

**Analyzed Projects:**
- .

## Project Summary

- **Primary Language:** Go
- **Total Files:** 18
- **Processed Files:** 12
- **Processed Size:** 52.38 KB
- **Estimated Tokens:** ~13,413

🔧 Supported technologies

Go, JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js, React, Python, Java, C, C++, Rust, PHP, Ruby, CSS (incl. SCSS/Sass/Less), HTML, Docker, and Kubernetes — with more easy to add in detector.go.

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md. Please keep the project dependency-free and run gofmt, go vet, and go test before opening a PR (CI enforces all three).

📄 License

Licensed under the MIT License.