Glide Plugins

Glide supports a simple plugin system similar to Git.

Existing Plugins

Some plugins exist today for Glide including:

  • glide-vc - The vendor cleaner allows you to strip files files not needed for building your application from the vendor/ directory.
  • glide-brew - Convert Go deps managed by glide to Homebrew resources to help you make brew formulas for you Go programs.
  • glide-hash - Generates a hash of the glide.yaml file compatible with Glides internal hash.

Note, to add plugins to this list please create a pull request.

How Plugins Work

When Glide encounters a subcommand that it does not know, it will try to delegate it to another executable according to the following rules.

Example:

$ glide install # We know this command, so we execute it
$ glide foo     # We don't know this command, so we look for a suitable
                # plugin.

In the example above, when glide receives the command foo, which it does not know, it will do the following:

  1. Transform the name from foo to glide-foo
  2. Look on the system $PATH for glide-foo. If it finds a program by that name, execute it...
  3. Or else, look at the current project's root for glide-foo. (That is, look in the same directory as glide.yaml). If found, execute it.
  4. If no suitable command is found, exit with an error.

Writing a Glide Plugin

A Glide plugin can be written in any language you wish, provided that it can be executed from the command line as a subprocess of Glide. The example included with Glide is a simple Bash script. We could just as easily write Go, Python, Perl, or even Java code (with a wrapper) to execute.

A glide plugin must be in one of two locations:

  1. Somewhere on the PATH
  2. In the same directory as glide.yaml

It is recommended that system-wide Glide plugins go in /usr/local/bin or $GOPATH/bin while project-specific plugins go in the same directory as glide.yaml.

Arguments and Flags

Say Glide is executed like this:

$ glide foo -name=Matt myfile.txt

Glide will interpret this as a request to execute glide-foo with the arguments -name=Matt myfile.txt. It will not attempt to interpret those arguments or modify them in any way.

Hypothetically, if Glide had a -x flag of its own, you could call this:

$ glide -x foo -name=Matt myfile.txt

In this case, glide would interpret and swollow the -x and pass the rest on to glide-foo as in the example above.

Example Plugin

File: glide-foo

#!/bin/bash

echo "Hello"