Upgrading old go project to work with go modules

Question

My $GOPATH contains 3 locations

1. /home//Documents/gotree
2. /home//Documents/perforce/modules/thirdparty/golibs
3. /home//Documents/perforce/modules/sggolibs/

Here location 1 is for general purposes, 2 and 3 for work-related libraries, which are maintained on one perforce server. These last two libraries are keeping in perforce so that anyone in the company should use these exact versions, not the library's latest version from internet.

In other location a couple of go servers are there, and all of them are using atleast a single library from $GOPATH location 2 and 3.

All those server are written 2,3 years ago, and does not contain any go.mod or any package management items.

My question is how do I upgrade all these servers to latest version go so that it will work with go modules, and probably a vendor directory to the thirdparty libraries?

Apologies if my question is too generic.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, Perforce is not one of the version control systems supported natively in the go command, so you may need to apply a bit of scripting or tooling in order to slot in the libraries from your Perforce repositories.

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One option is to set up a module proxy to serve the dependencies from Perforce, and have your developers set the GOPROXY and GONOSUMDB environment variables so that they use that proxy instead of (or in addition to) the defaults (proxy.golang.org,direct).

Note that Go modules compute and store checksums for dependencies, so if you have modified any third-party dependencies it is important that any modifications be served with unique version strings (or different module paths!) so that they don't collide with upstream versions with different contents. (I seem to recall that the Athens proxy has support for filtering and/or injecting modules, although I'm not very familiar with its capabilities or configuration.)

I'm not aware of any Go module proxy implementations that support Perforce today, but you might double-check https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=%22module+proxy%22 to be sure; at the very least, there are a number of implementations listed there that you could use as a reference. The protocol is intentionally very simple, so implementing it hopefully wouldn't be a huge amount of work.

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Another option — probably less work in the short term but more in the long term — is to use replace directives in each module to replace the source code for each Perforce-hosted dependency with the corresponding filesystem path. You could probably write a small script to automate that process; the go mod edit command is intended to support that kind of scripting.

Replacement modules are required to have go.mod files (to reduce confusion due to typos), so if you opt for this approach you may need to run go mod init in one or more of your Perforce directories to create them.

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With either of the above approaches, it is probably simplest to start with as few modules as possible in your first-party repository: ideally just one at the root of your package tree. You can run go mod init there, then set up your replace directives and/or local proxy, then run go mod tidy to fill in the dependency graph.