Today I Learned Go Part 2

#

This is the second part of my notes from going through a go-tooling-workshop.

The vendor Directory #

Whenever an import path example.com/foo is found in Go code, the go tool will navigate the directory tree towards the root, looking for a directory containing a vendor directory. When a vendor directory is found, the go tool will look into vendor/example.com/foo, if that directory exists it will be used as the package imported with the path example.com/foo. If it doesn't exist the go tool will continue upwards looking for other vendor directories, and eventually in GOPATH.

So given a project/directory structure like the following:

GOPATH
├── client
│   └── main.go
├── server
│   ├── Dockerfile
│   ├── main.go
│   ├── main_test.go
│   ├── model.go
│   ├── saved.sqlite
│   └── saved_test.sqlite
└── vendor
    └── github.com
        └── contd
            └── links
                └── links.go

The main.go file in the server directory has an import statement like so:

import (
	"github.com/contd/links"
)

The go tool will use the code from the vendor directory when compiling the project above even if there exists a project in the GOPATH that matches the import statement. For another project that has the same import statement in one of its go files but does not have a vendor directory, the go tool will use the code from the GOPATH root.

The internal Directory #

To further divide the visibility of Identifiers, you can use an internal directory to make identifiers only visible to a subset of packages in a project. For example, given the project structure below:

├── client
│   └── main.go
└── server
    ├── Dockerfile
    ├── internal
    │   └── links
    │       └── links.go
    ├── main.go
    ├── main_test.go
    ├── model.go

The server directory's go files have access or the ability to import github.com/contd/links/internal/linksbut the client directory cannot import from .../import/links.

The dep Tool #

There are many dependency management tools developed for go but one of the latest utilizes the vendor directory along with a few other nice features. To begin, it needs to be installed like so:

go get -u github.com/golang/dep/cmd/dep

To setup a project to utilize dep, you run the following inside your project directory:

dep init
dep ensure -update

This will create:

• Gopkg.toml: a file where you add restrictions and extra info about your package.
• vendor: containing all the dependencies for your package.
• Gopkg.lock: an autogenerated file keeping track of the contents of vendor.

Then to update a dependency to the a new version (like github.com/pkg/errors or github.com/Sirupsend/logrun) you run:

dep ensure github.com/pkg/errors@^0.8.0
dep ensure github.com/Sirupsen/logrus@1.0.0

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