in category Golang Programming
Sometimes, we may want to use a library but a slightly modified version. It happens very often when we develop the library but test it in the context of an application. Go has a handy mechanism in go modules that can help us with it.
To make it work, we have to clone the library somewhere near the target project and run the following command in the application’s folder.
go mod edit -replace github.com/my/library ../path
The path can be both relative (to the application root folder) or absolute. The go.mod file will be edited as follows.
module github.com/myorg/app
require (
github.com/thirdpart/library v1.1.0
)
replace github.com/myorg/library => ../path
Notice that you can modify the go.mod file without using the the go mod edit -replace command.
From this moment, every time we compile the application, the updated dependency will be used. There’s only one thing to remember. When you finish working, don’t forget to remove the replace directive from your go.mod file.
Another usage of the replace directive is when we want to replace one library with its (maybe our) fork. Unfortunately, it happens that a library author stops maintaining the code but we need to make some changes to it. Replacing the dependency may be the easiest way of solving this problem.
module github.com/myorg/app
require (
github.com/thirdpart/library v1.1.0
)
replace github.com/thirdpart/library => github.com/myorg/thirdpart-forked
The mechanizm is simple and very powerful. Hope you’ll find it helpful!
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#golang
#modules