Is including assets (with a tool like go-bindata) an anti-pattern?

I'm developing a web application and thought it would be a good idea to use a tool like go-bindata to include the assets in the binary. Now I've come to re-evaluate that decision: is this a good idea or am I over-complicating things? What do you think?

I don't think there's much improvement if you're hosting your app yourself, but it's a huge win when you need to distribute your app for many people/companies.

If you consider HTML templates + JS + CSS + images + i18n files + etc, is a difference of distribute a lot of files vs. a single binary.

It's also a lot easier to make self-updatable apps with something like go-update.

I personally recommend fileb0x instead go-bindata.

I agree with @ahacker16 except about hosting your application yourself; bundling also allows these assets to be served from memory instead of disk which will always be faster :)

Personally I use go.rice for all my embedding needs, it can also look at local FS so it would still allow for one to manually override templates and what not.

I love this approach. I make an app that people run on their own machines and it's convenient that it's just a single binary - no directory layout or environment vars to worry about. 

I don't think it's an antipattern as long as you provide the fat binary along with either an option to override some assets with custom versions or alternatively provide a slim version that uses the filesystem.

Using binned assets has the advantage that a deployment is much much easier and the app doesn't rely as much on the filesystem and keeps permissions simpler.

If you care about 'time to glass' (effectively startup time), you might want to consider NodeJS bundlers like Rollup or Webpack which will 'treeshake' the JavaScript, removing unused code.  I don't know of equivalents for GoLang?

Use Docker.

it is. if you are writing a web app, then you should bundle in a zip before you deploy. If you are using a cli-tool and it needs specific assets, then it should bundle too, whether it is with a native package manager or not it doesn't matter. external assets shouldn't be compiled with the rest of the program.