For tools in golang like goimports the best practice at the moment is to have a tools.go with a "tools" build tag. See https://github.com/golang/go/issues/25922

For tools in golang like goimports the best practice at the moment is to have a tools.go with a "tools" build tag. See https://github.com/golang/go/issues/25922 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/25922 For non-go tools like the protoc compiler I don't think the golang tooling provides any help. A heavyweight option would be a build system like bazel