Go Modules

What are Go Modules?

Go Modules are primarily a dependency management solution.

A module:

• Is primarily a dependency management tool, not a project organization tool.
• Is imported to get access to public exported members in your own project.
• One module can produce n binaries.
• A module can be used in a monorepo or single CLI tool.

A module doesn’t:

• Handle build or binary path metadata.
• Have any relationship to the produced artifacts.

Module Tips

• Use canonical import path (aka) github.com/sheldonhull/mygomod if you want to support go install commands.
• Use mymod.local if there’s no need to support remote imports or installs.
  • This allows gofumpt and other tools to correctly sort the imports from the standard library apart from your own imports, without requiring a canonical name format.
• Stick with one module in the repo if possible, to simplify tooling, linting, and testing. This is important in monorepos as much of the tooling that uses paths like go test ./... will not work with multi-module repos in a project.

Project & Build Tooling

• Use devtools.go to create a list of CLI tools that should be installed with Mage.
• Use tools.go to put _ "remotemodulename" in, and clearly identify that a tool such as Stringer or linters are not dependencies for the primary module, but instead are tooling dependencies.