Go takes its documentation very seriously, and nobody would blame you if you found it confusing that someone might reference godoc in one breath and go doc in the next.

This isn’t just a to-may-to to-mah-to kind of thing. All of these concepts are related.

godoc—the web server

The godoc tool is intended primarily to run a documentation server in your browser on localhost.

godoc -http=":6060"

It includes the documentation for the Go standard library, along with any package that lives in your GOPATH.

It can also format documentation as plain text on the command-line, where you would pass the import path of the package you are interested in. This was added as an afterthought.

godoc golang.org/x/tools/godoc

Running godoc without any arguments will output the usage statement for the tool.

usage: godoc package [name ...] godoc -http=:6060 ...

go doc—the go subcommand

The familiar go command-line tool, which is used to go run or go build or go test , also has a subcommand doc .

The doc subcommand will print out the documentation for whatever argument you pass it: a package, const, func, type, var, or method.

Unlike the godoc command, go doc was intended from the start to be convenient from the command-line.

The most important difference between godoc and go doc on the command-line, is that the syntax for go doc is, well, Go.

go doc gob.Decoder

The equivalent command using godoc is a bit more awkward, requiring the full import path:

godoc encoding/gob Decoder

The default behavior of go doc when calling it without arguments, is to display the documentation for the current package.

godoc.org—the website

godoc.org is, confusingly, sometimes referred to as GoDoc. It hosts documentation for Go packages that are not a part of the Go standard library. Anything hosted publicly on Bitbucket, GitHub, Google Project Hosting or Launchpad is likely to show up on GoDoc. In fact, searching for a project by its import path will automatically add it to the site.

The documentation that you will see on godoc.org is very similar to the documentation that you get when running the local godoc server, but as pointed out in the comments, godoc.org doesn’t use the output from the godoc tool.

go/doc—the package

The command godoc and the website godoc.org both rely on the package go/doc to extract source code documentation.

If you were to use godoc to ask about go/doc , it would tell you all about it.

$ godoc go/doc PACKAGE DOCUMENTATION package doc import "go/doc" Package doc extracts source code documentation from a Go AST. ...

If in doubt…

When people are referring to the package go/doc in casual conversation, they’ll often drop the slash. And when saying go doc they could be referring to GoDoc, the website. And, you know how it is… they might actually be talking about the godoc tool.

If you’re unsure of exactly which one they mean, ask for clarification!

Summary

The package go/doc is used by other tools to extract the documentation comments from the AST.

The command-line tool godoc is a web server first, and outputs plain text documentation to STDOUT as an afterthought, whereas go doc is intended to be used to output documentation on the command-line.

The godoc.org website is the publicly searchable documentation for go packages that are not a part of the standard library.

With thanks to Rob Pike for clarifying the reasoning behind the various tools.