Manage Dependencies With GODEP

Introduction If you are using 3rd party packages, (packages that you don't own or control), you will want a way to create a reproducible build every time you build your projects. If you use 3rd party packages directly and the package authors change things, your projects could break. Even if things don't break, code changes could create inconsistent behavior and bugs.

Keith Rarick's tool godep is a great step in the right direction for managing 3rd party dependencies and creating reproducible builds. The godep tool gives you two options for managing dependencies. The first option creates a dependency file with version control information and then with some godep magic, the code is built against those versions. You can also Vendor your 3rd party packages inside your projects as well. You never need to change a single source code file and everything is accomplished in conjunction with the go tooling.

Downloading Godep Download godep using go get and make sure your $GOPATH/bin directory is in your PATH.

go get github.com/kr/godep

export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin

Create A Project Build your project using the 3rd party packages as you normally would. Since godep does not require you to change any import paths in the code, 'go get' the code you need and import those packages directly. To keep the post simple, I am going to use an existing program called News Search that uses one 3rd party dependency.

export GOPATH=$HOME/example

go get github.com/goinggo/newssearch