go get installation from a local fork

Question

I am trying to install a go package from a local directory (basically I checked out and existing package and applied a pending pull request).

$ # Both commands give a similar output
$ go get -u file:///Users/me/workspaces/go/somepackage
$ go get -u /Users/me/workspaces/go/somepackage
unrecognized import path "[...]" (import path does not begin with hostname)

Since go get is downloading then installing, I tried:

$ go install /Users/me/workspaces/go/somepackage
[] cannot import absolute path

Any experienced go user could give a hand?

Answer 1

As far as I know you can't do this with go get, bur you can copy the directory in to GOPATH manually. If you forked example.com/somepackage then copy /Users/me/workspaces/go/somepackage to ~/go/src/example.com/somepackage or ./vendor/example.com/somepackage.

That being said, the best solution is usually to host the forked code somewhere, and then use that import path. Decency tools such as dep and modules support fetching a different origin for packages.

Answer 2

I could be wrong and maybe there is a workaround exists

Go documentantion on cmd/go/#hdr-Remote_import_paths says:

The supported version control systems are:

Bazaar      .bzr
Fossil      .fossil
Git         .git
Mercurial   .hg
Subversion  .svn

And a later:

For example,

import "example.org/pkg/foo"

will result in the following requests:

https://example.org/pkg/foo?go-get=1 (preferred)
http://example.org/pkg/foo?go-get=1  (fallback, only with -insecure)

So I suppose that go get never looks in filesystem repos.

Need to investigate source code of go get to be sure.

I will be glad if someone will prove that I am incorrect in this question.

UPDATE

Maybe I'm mistaken but I suppose that all abilities of go get to work with VCSs are here: https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/src/cmd/go/internal/get/vcs.go

And I don't see here a possibility to work with git local repos.

Answer 3

If you just want to use a different branch (your PR branch), you can continue using the original import path.

• Go get the original package first.
• Go into the downloaded package in your local file system cd $GOPATH/pkg/<package directory>
• From your local package cache, switch to the branch you want to pull from. git checkout <PR branch>
• Now go get -u <package>

If the package is available locally, go get update will just pull the latest code from the branch your local package is checked out to.