Go Tools — go get

Download dependency.

Continuing from the previous article about Go Tools — env, fmt, imports,

Today, I would like to write about “go get” which is the most frequently used one for dependency management.

the command is executed in the form of

$ go get <package@version>

This command lets you install the desired dependency with the specific version. Otherwise, you can simply add a suffix like @latest to fetch the latest version, or @none to uninstall the dependency.

For example, let’s say you have a clean directory with zero dependencies in $GOPATH/pkg/mod directory.

in unix system, that’d be $HOME/go/pkg/mod

→ /Users/yeongseokkim/go/pkg/mod

Confirming that there are no files or directories before doing download test

(to clean up, you can do it by $ go clean -modcache )

➜ mod tree .
.
0 directories, 0 files

and then execute the following command to download a module with a specific version in a Go application project .

➜ go-app-one git:(main) go get github.com/youngstone89/go-module-one@v0.1.1
go: downloading github.com/youngstone89/go-module-one v0.1.1

Once the download is completed, you can see changes in the $GOPATH/pkg/mod directory like this

➜  mod tree .
.
├── cache
│   └── download
│       └── github.com
│           └── youngstone89
│               └── go-module-one
│                   └── @v
│                       ├── list
│                       ├── v0.1.1.info
│                       ├── v0.1.1.lock
│                       ├── v0.1.1.mod
│                       ├── v0.1.1.zip
│                       └── v0.1.1.ziphash
└── github.com
    └── youngstone89
        └── go-module-one@v0.1.1
            ├── README.md
            ├── go.mod
            └── pkg
                └── kafka
                    └── consumer.go

cache directory and github.com got newly created to store the downloaded dependency.

Now you are ready to import the downloaded dependency and implement.

This is how go get works.

Thanks!