Frequently Asked Questions (F.A.Q.)

Q: Why does Glide have the concept of sub-packages when Go doesn't?

In Go every directory is a package. This works well when you have one repo containing all of your packages. When you have different packages in different VCS locations things become a bit more complicated. A project containing a collection of packages should be handled with the same information including the version. By grouping packages this way we are able to manage the related information.

Q: bzr (or hg) is not working the way I expected. Why?

These are works in progress, and may need some additional tuning. Please take a look at the vcs package. If you see a better way to handle it please let us know.

Q: Should I check vendor/ into version control?

That‘s up to you. It’s a personal or organizational decision. Glide will help you install the outside dependencies on demand or help you manage the dependencies as they are checked into your version control system.

By default, commands such as glide update and glide install install on-demand. To manage a vendor folder that's checked into version control use the flags:

  • --update-vendored (aliased to -u) to update the vendored dependencies.
  • --strip-vcs (aliased to -s) to strip VCS metadata (e.g., .git directories) from the vendor folder.
  • --strip-vendor (aliased to -v) to strip nested vendor/ directories.

Q: How do I import settings from GPM, Godep, Gom, or GB?

There are two parts to importing.

  1. If a package you import has configuration for GPM, Godep, Gom, or GB Glide will recursively install the dependencies automatically.
  2. If you would like to import configuration from GPM, Godep, Gom, or GB to Glide see the glide import command. For example, you can run glide import godep for Glide to detect the projects Godep configuration and generate a glide.yaml file for you.

Each of these will merge your existing glide.yaml file with the dependencies it finds for those managers, and then emit the file as output. It will not overwrite your glide.yaml file.

You can write it to file like this:

$ glide import godep -f glide.yaml

Q: Can Glide fetch a package based on OS or Arch?

Yes. Using the os and arch fields on a package, you can specify which OSes and architectures the package should be fetched for. For example, the following package will only be fetched for 64-bit Darwin/OSX systems:

- package: some/package
  os:
    - darwin
  arch:
    - amd64

The package will not be fetched for other architectures or OSes.

Q: How did Glide get its name?

Aside from being catchy, “glide” is a contraction of “Go Elide”. The idea is to compress the tasks that normally take us lots of time into a just a few seconds.