Gophers love nuts.

nut is a tool that allows Go projects to declare dependencies, download dependencies, rewrite import paths and ensure that dependencies are properly vendored.

To accomplish this goal, nut does three things:

• Introduces a metadata file with dependency information.
• Fetches your project's dependencies and rewrite their import paths.
• Introduces conventions for managing vendored dependencies.

nut is specifically designed to manage dependencies for a binary program. If you are making a library, please follow the standard Go way.

I made nut as part of the Gopher Gala contest. If you like what you see, please vote for it.

Make sure you have a working Go environment. See the install instructions.

To install nut, simply run:

$ go get github.com/jingweno/nut

Make sure your PATH includes to the $GOPATH/bin directory so your commands can be easily used:

export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin

Inside your GOPATH, run:

$ nut new hello_world

Let's checkout what nut has generated for us:

$ cd hello_world
$ tree .
.
├── .gitignore
├── Nut.toml
├── README.md
└── main.go

0 directories, 4 files

First let's check out Nut.toml:

[application]

name = "hello_world"
version = "0.0.1"
authors = ["Your Name <[email protected]>"]

This piece of application information is reserved for future usage.

It's quite simple to add a dependency. Simply add it to your Nut.toml file:

[dependencies]

"github.com/octokit/go-octokit/octokit" = ""
"github.com/fhs/go-netrc/netrc" = "4422b68c9c"

The format of declaring a dependency is PACKAGE = COMMIT-ISH. PACKAGE is a valid package path that passes into go get. COMMIT-ISH can be any tag, sha or branch. An empty COMMIT-ISH means the latest version of the dependency.

Run nut install to download dependencies. nut puts dependencies to vendor/_nuts/. Let's take a look this folder:

$ tree vendor
vendor
└── _nuts
    └── github.com
        ├── fhs
        │   └── go-netrc
        │       ...
        └── octokit
            └── go-octokit
                ...

20 directories, 98 files

The import paths of all dependencies are rewritten to be relative to vendor/_nuts. For example, assuming github.com/octokit/go-octokit depends on github.com/sawyer/go-sawyer, all the import paths of go-octokit to go-sawyer will be relative to vendor/_nuts since they're vendored.

To import a dependency, refer to it by its full import path:

package main

import (
  "github.com/jingweno/hello_world/vendor/_nuts/github.com/octokit/go-octokit/octokit"
)

func main() {
    c := octokit.NewClient()
    ...
}

All dependencies are properly vendored to vendor/_nuts and your program is referring to import paths relative to this folder. go build and go test should just work.

nut allows you to lock dependencies, vendor them and rewrite their import paths. The dependencies vendored by nut are "self contained" and are ready for use without overriding GOPATH. Most existing dependency management tools in Go override GOPATH and you need an extra tool to build your project. With nut, you can build your project with just go build. nut properly vendors dependencies so that existing go commands work as a standard Go project.

godep allow rewriting the import paths of dependencies with godep save -r. nut does exactly the same thing in this regard. However, godep doesn't allow updating any dependency with rewritten import paths. nut doesn't currently support update of dependencies but it's a high priority item that will be implemented next. The workflow will be as straightforward as nut update FOO to update an individual dependency specified in Nut.toml.

Besides, nut's design philosophy is very different from godep: nut is explicit about dependency management with a manifest file (Nut.toml) and allows locking of dependencies, whereas godep isn't.

• nut
• hub (WIP)

• godep
• party