Hiding dependencies to the end user.

Vendir is a utility helps to import third party vendor libraries without introducing dependencies in the go.mod.

This way, a library itself can separate its exported APIs from its internal dependencies.

go install github.com/xhd2015/go-vendir/cmd/vendir@latest

vendir create ./internal/third/src ./internal/third/vendir

This command will copy all dependencies in ./internal/third/src/vendor to ./internal/third/vendir, and rewrite all import paths pointing to the target package.

Prior to running this command, you should create a go.mod, add dependency and run go mod vendor inside ./internal/third/src.

In general, the source directory should contain a go.mod and a vendor directory describing all it's dependencies.

The target directory then will be created by copying all dependencies from source vendor directory and rewrite all import paths(except stdlib) to internal paths.

This results in all third party code self-included, so go.mod does not change at all.

Check ./testdata/example for demonstration.

And also xgo/cmd/xgo/internal/gen.go for real world example.

It is recommended to put a gen.go file in the internal directory alongside with src and vendir:

package internal

//go:generate vendir create --update --force ./src ./vendir

The xgo project itself provides a range of utilities, among which the incremental coverage tool depends on heavily a lot of external APIs.

But we don't want to expose these dependencies to the end user. Initially we took an approach that compiles the incremental coverage tool standalone and download it when required. But that has obvious shortcomings, such as bad maintenance and underperformed user experience.

We take the step further, why binray dependency? Isn't there a way to statically compile all code together?

So we came up with this vendir utility.