gsv

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Dependencies
• Installation
• Usage
• FAQ
• TODO
• Credits

Introduction

gsv is the Go Submodule Vendoring tool. It does native Go vendoring using Git submodules. This approach makes configuration files redundant and doesn't require additional tooling to build a gsv-vendored Go project because Git (which you have installed anyway) is used to track the revisions of your vendored dependencies.

Therefore, in order to fetch and install a Go package that has used gsv to vendor its dependencies a simple

go get $PACKAGE_URL

will do the job. Go 1.5.X needs some additional steps (see FAQ).

Compared to a copy-based vendoring approach gsv preserves the dependencies' histories and links them to the main project's history which facilitates the usage of the Git tool suite. Therefore, it's possible to go through each dependency's git log and analyze what changes have been done since the last update. Also, git bisect can be used to find a commit in a dependency's repository that for example caused the main project to break. And so on.

Dependencies

libgit2 needs to be installed. Packages exist for

• Ubuntu
• Fedora
• Arch Linux
• Homebrew

If your distro does not package it then you need to install it from source.

Installation

After installing the dependencies execute

go get github.com/toxeus/gsv

and make sure that $GOPATH/bin is in your $PATH.

Usage

Let's assume we want to vendor go-etcd and its recursive dependencies in our project

cd $GOPATH/$OUR_PROJECT
gsv github.com/coreos/go-etcd/etcd
git commit -m "vendor: added go-etcd and its dependencies"

Done.

FAQ

I have a problem. What next?

Please open an issue and try to give reproducible examples ;)

I want to contribute. What next?

If you want to contribute a bigger change then please open an issue such that we can discuss what the best way is to proceed.

If you want to fix something minor then feel free to open a pull request straightaway.

How do I update all my dependencies?

As of now using

git submodule foreach 'git fetch && git rebase master@{u}'

will do the trick. Some day it'll be integrated into gsv.

Do you know about git2go?

Yes! Last time I checked the support for submodules in git2go was not sufficient for this project's requirements. That's why the Git code ended up being written in Cgo.

How do I get and build a gsv project using Go 1.5?

Like this

export GO15VENDOREXPERIMENT=1
go get -d $PROJECT_URL
cd $GOPATH/$PROJECT_PATH
git submodule update --init
go install ./...

How do I build gsv using Go 1.5?

See here

go build ./... or go test ./... fails

gsv only vendors dependencies which are needed to satisfy the building and testing of your project. Dependencies that are needed to build and test the vendored dependencies are not pulled in.

As a consequence go build ./... and/or go test ./... might break when run from the project's root folder. To fix this the following commands should be used

go build $(go list ./... | grep -v vendor)
go test $(go list ./... | grep -v vendor)

This is not a joke but the official recommendation by the golang team.

Note that pulling in the build- and test-dependencies of your dependencies is unlikely to fix go build ./... and go test ./... because the pulled in packages will then have unsatisfied dependencies. And going all the way down in the recursion doesn't seem to be the right solution for managing your build- and test-dependencies.

TODO

In order of priority. Might not be implemented exactly as suggested here.

1. Add a -purge flag such that unused vendored submodules will be detected and removed.
2. Use code from Go's stdlib instead from gb-vendor
3. Add a -updateall flag such that all dependencies are updated to their current origin/master.
4. Take a look at git2go and see if there is progress in submodules support.
5. Look for alternatives for libgit2. This dependency reduces portability and makes installation a bit harder.

Credits

This project could bootstrap on the work done for gb-vendor.