Dependency management in Skycoin

Skycoin's Go projects should use dep to vendor their dependencies. If the project is an application, i.e. it provides a go run command in the cmd/ folder, the vendor/ folder should be committed to the repo.

If the project is a library, the vendor/ folder should not be committed to the repo.

Go has a new modules system for handling dependencies but it does not appear to be mature and dep has been working fine. In the future we may switch to using Go modules, although the Skycoin node/wallet itself will continue to use committed, vendored dependencies so that the source is entirely contained in one repository.

Dep guide

Installing dep for development:

go get -u github.com/golang/dep/cmd/dep

dep vendors all dependencies into the repo.

If you change the dependencies, you should update them as needed with dep ensure.

Use dep help for instructions on vendoring a specific version of a dependency, or updating them.

When updating or initializing, dep will find the latest version of a dependency that will compile.

Examples:

Initialize all dependencies:

dep init

Update all dependencies:

dep ensure -update -v

Add a single dependency (latest version):

dep ensure github.com/foo/bar

Add a single dependency (more specific version), or downgrade an existing dependency:

dep ensure github.com/foo/bar@tag