NOTE: I neither use nor maintain this project anymore.

go-localpath

This is a tiny shell script for managing Go projects with vendored dependencies.

Motivation

go get is great when you're working by yourself, but when you're working on a project with other people you typically need to ensure you have precisely the same library code (a hermetic build).

To accomplish this, people generally check in dependencies with their projects. Then the question becomes: how to pick up the local dependencies? So far, the community's solutions (e.g., goven) have involved rewriting all import paths for the vendored dependency to point to the new location. This has multiple disadvantages:

• Import paths are now annoyingly long and don't have the nice correspondence to repo locations they did before.
• Updating the dependency is now more complicated than simply doing a git pull or similar (you must rewrite the import paths again). Similarly, it's not easy to know how your version of a dependency differs from the canonical one because the diffs include a bunch of changes to import paths.
• The code is now tied to the particular location of the project. (For instance, if you changed the name of the project, you've got to rewrite all the import paths again.)

go-localpath takes a much simpler approach. It just temporarily changes $GOPATH to the local vendor directory. This means that:

• Import paths are unchanged.
• You can install/update a depedency just by copying it into your vendor directory.
• Your project doesn't even have to live in your normal $GOPATH.

Installation

You just need to get the glp script into your $PATH. There are many ways you can do this, including:

• Clone this repo somewhere; say ~/scripts/go-localpath. In your .bashrc/.zshrc, add this line:

  export $PATH="$HOME/scripts/go-localpath:$PATH"
  

• Download the glp script directly and put it in a directory already in your $PATH (maybe /usr/local/bin or ~/bin/).

Usage

In the root of your project, make an file called .glp with the name of your vendor directory. (This file should also be committed to version control).

$ echo 'vendor' > .glp

Now, instead of using go, use glp. The script will check for a .glp file in the current directory (or any directory above) and change $GOPATH to be .:./vendor/ (actually paths relative to the directory containing .glp and expanded to absolute paths); if the file does not exist it leaves $GOPATH alone. In any case, it forwards all arguments to go. So, for example to build your project just type

$ glp build

To vendor a library, copy the files into the right place under vendor/src. You can also just use glp get -- because $GOPATH is pointing at the local vendor/ directory, the dependency will be installed into your project. You'll want to delete the VCS metadata file (e.g., .git) in the library directory, and you can commit the vendored library to version control. You can update by simply deleting the library and running go get again.

You could also keep your dependencies as git submodules (if you're using git) if you want. In this case, you would manually manage the directories rather than using go get.

Replacing the go command

You can also make a function to just run glp every time you run go so you never have to think about running glp. This shouldn't change your non-glp use of go at all (unless you happen to have files called .glp laying around). In your .bashrc/.zshrc:

PATH=/path/to/go-localpath:$PATH # As before
go() {
  command glp $@
}

glp doesn't do this for you by default because it's a little magical.

Tips

• If you're using git, you'll want to ignore built vendor packages. Assuming you're using vendor/ as your vendor directory, your .gitignore should probably have these entries:

    /vendor/pkg
    /vendor/bin
  

• glp will add any number of directories to your $GOPATH. Just put one on each line.

• You can use the fact that glp adds the current (project root) director to the $GOPATH to organize your app's packages, if you want (notice this means that your app code can live anywhere -- it's not limited to your normal $GOPATH). Example structure:

    PROJECT_ROOT/
    `-.glp            # Contains the single line "vendor"
    `-app.go          # package main. Imports "util" and "github.com/bob/foobar"
    `-src/
      `-util/
        `-util.go     # package util
    `-vendor/
      `-src/
        `-github.com/
          `-bob/
            `-foobar/