This is a quick start guide to using Glide once you have it installed.
Glide can detect the dependencies in use on a project and create an initial glide.yaml file for you. This detection can import the configuration from Godep, GPM, Gom, and GB. To do this change into the top level directory for the project and run:
$ glide init
When this is complete you'll have a glide.yaml file populated with the projects being used. You can open up this file and even edit it to add information such as versions.
To fetch the dependencies and set them to any versions specified in the glide.yaml file use the following command:
$ glide up
The up is short for update. This will fetch any dependencies specified in the glide.yaml file, walk the dependency tree to make sure any dependencies of the dependencies are fetched, and set them to the proper version. While walking the tree it will make sure versions are set and configuration from Godep, GPM, Gom, and GB is imported.
The fetched dependencies are all placed in the vendor/ folder at the root of the project. The go toolchain will use the dependencies here prior to looking in the GOPATH or GOROOT if you are using Go 1.6+ or Go 1.5 with the Go 1.5 Vendor Experiment enabled.
Glide will then create a glide.lock file. This file contains the entire dependency tree pinned to specific commit ids. This file, as we'll see in a moment, can be used to recreate the exact dependency tree and versions used.
All of the dependencies Glide fetches are into the top level vendor/ folder for a project. Go provides the ability for each package to have a vendor/ folder. Glide only uses a top level folder for two reasons:
vendor/ folders it will be in the compiled binary tree times. This can quickly lead to binary bloat.vendor/ folder are not compatible with the same dependency in other locations. Even if they are the same version. Go sees them as different packages because they are in different locations. This is a problem for database drivers, loggers, and many other things. If you try to pass an instance created from one location of a package to another you'll encounter errors.If you want to install the dependencies needed by a project use the install command like so:
$ glide install
This command does one of two things:
glide.lock file is present it retrieves, if missing from the vendor/ folder, the dependency and sets it to the exact version in the glide.lock file. The dependencies are fetched and versions set concurrently so this operation is fairly quick.glide.lock file then an update will be performed.If you're not managing the dependency versions for a project but need to install the dependencies you should use the install command.
Glide can help you add more dependencies to the glide.yaml file with the get command.
$ glide get github.com/Masterminds/semver
The get command is similar to go get but instead fetches dependencies into the vendor/ folder and adds them to the glide.yaml file. This command can take one or more dependencies to fetch.
The get command can also work with versions.
$ glide get github.com/Masterminds/semver#~1.2.0
The # is used as a separator between the dependency name and a version to use. The version can be a semantic version, version range, branch, tag, or commit id.