DirScanner - Directory Tree Generator CLI in Go

DirScanner - A CLI Tool to Markdown Your Directory

(Source Code: DirScanner)

This is a small CLI project I wrote in Go — basically a tool that scans any directory and writes out a nice directory tree in Markdown format. It’s called DirScanner, and I use it to generate structure docs for projects I work on.

Why I Made It

I was documenting a project and wanted a clean Markdown view of its folder structure. Of course, you can use tree on Unix, but it doesn’t generate proper Markdown and isn’t customizable. So I thought — why not make one myself?

What It Does

It scans a directory and prints out its structure (with folders/files) in a readable format into a Markdown file. Some features I added:

• Custom Connector Styles: You can change how the tree branches look — like using +-- or |__, etc.
• Exclude Files/Dirs: You can skip certain extensions or folders like node_modules, .txt, etc.
• Limit Depth: If you don’t want to scan the whole tree, you can restrict how deep it goes.
• .dirignore Support: You can keep a .dirignore file just like .gitignore and it will follow that too.

Demo

Here’s a screen shot of it.

Installation

You can install it directly using:

go install github.com/SumitKumar-17/DirScanner@latest

Basic Usage

To scan a directory and generate a Markdown file with its structure:

dirscanner <directory> <output-file>

For example:

dirscanner ./myproject tree.md

This will create a tree.md file with the structure of the myproject directory.

Example Output

├── .dirignore
├── file2.txt
└── sumit
    ├── file1.txt
    └── sumit-1
        ├── kafka.txt
        └── sumit-2
            ├── file.txt
            └── sumit-3
                └── file3.txt

Excluding Stuff

If you want to skip certain types of files or folders, just use the --exclude flag:

dirscanner ./dir tree.md --exclude ".txt" --exclude "node_modules"

You can also create a .dirignore file in the root of the directory, and the tool will automatically respect it.

Limiting Depth

To avoid scanning too deep into the folder hierarchy, you can limit the depth using the --depth flag:

dirscanner ./dir tree.md --depth 2

This will only go 2 levels deep in the folder tree.

Custom Tree Symbols

You can customize the visual style of the tree using different connector symbols:

dirscanner ./dir tree.md --intermediate "+-- " --last "`-- " --prefix "    " --branch "|   "

This helps you get exactly the look you want in the Markdown output.

Contribution

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open issues or pull requests on GitHub if you want to fix something or suggest improvements. I’d love to see others use or extend this.

Was fun writing this one in Go — learned a lot about file system traversal and CLI flag parsing. Looking forward to building more tools like this.