party

Overview ¶

Party is a tool to automate the use of third party packages.

Many existing Go package managers provide solutions to the problem of relying on other projects' code. Go handles the use of other packages elegantly, but is prone to problems when that code has breaking changes or is removed from the Internet. As a solution, the FAQ suggests copying any third party repositories into your own project and changing your import paths to match. This is a recursive process, as you must then perform the same procedure for those copied packages and so on, until all leaf packages have no external imports.

party is a tool that performs all of this work. It:

1. Rewrites all external imports in both your project and the third party directory from "other.com/user/package" to "host.com/user/your_project/_third_party/other.com/user/package".

2. Updates or copies files from "$GOPATH/src/other.com/user/package" to "$GOPATH/src/host.com/user/your_project/_third_party/other.com/user/package".

3. Returns to step 1 until no more rewrites are performed.

Usage ¶

From your project's root directory, for the first run:

$ party -c

Subsequent invocations can omit -c.

The flags are:

-c
	create the third party directory if it does not exist
-u
	run "go get -d -u <pkg>" on packages imported by party for the
	current package
-d="_third_party"
	set the third party directory
-v
	enable verbose output
-n
	dry run: actions are printed instead of run
-r
	import third party packages as relative, local imports

App Engine and Relative Imports ¶

When working on an App Engine project, use the -r flag. This will cause all third party imports to be local packages. This is needed because otherwise App Engine will run init() routines from your .go files twice if your app is also in your $GOPATH.

Bugs ¶

There is no guarantee that the source directory exists. For example, a package may have a OS-specific file (file_windows.go) which imports another package. On non-Windows, that other package will not have been fetched during "go get" and will thus not exist. These packages must be fetched using "go get" or some other method by hand. Or, running party on a Windows machine (in this case) will correctly copy those files. These cases are reported when running party.

party performs the equivalent of gofmt on any files affected by the import rewrite, thus the diff may be somewhat larger than just the import lines.

Third party imports that use local (relative) packages will fail, as those packages are assumed to be part of the standard library. Those packages will not be copied.