gows

Go Workspace / Environment Manager, to easily manage the Go Workspace during development.

The idea

Work in isolated (development) environment when you're working on your Go projects. No cross-project dependency version missmatch, no more packages left out from vendor/.

No need for initializing a go workspace either, your project can be located anywhere, not just in a predefined $GOPATH workspace. gows will take care about crearing the (per-project isolated) workspace directory structure, no matter where your project is located.

gows works perfectly with other Go tools, all it does is it ensures that every project gets it's own, isolated Go workspace and sets $GOPATH accordingly.

Install

Requirements

• Go with a prepared $GOPATH
  • required for creating the GOPATH/bin symlink, to have shared GOPATH/bin between workspaces

Install & Prepare Go

Install & configure Go - official guide.

Make sure you have $GOPATH/bin in your $PATH, e.g. by adding

export PATH="$PATH:$GOPATH/bin"

to your ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc (don't forget to source it or to open a new Terminal window/tab if you just added this line to the profile file).

This makes sure that the Go projects you build/install will be available in any Terminal / Command Line window, without the need to type in the full path of the binary.

Install gows

go install github.com/bitrise-io/gows@latest

That's all. If you have a "properly" configured Go environment (see the previous Install section) then you should be able to run gows version now, and be able to run gows in any directory.

Usage

Run gows init inside your Go project's directory (you only have to do this once). This will initialize the isolated Workspace for the project and create a gows.yml file in your project's directory (you can commit or .gitignore this file if you want to).

Once you initialized the workspace, just prefix your commands (any command) with gows.

Example:

Instead of go get ./... use gows go get ./..., instead of go install use gows go install, etc.

That's pretty much all :)

If you'd want to clean up the workspace you can run gows clear in your project's directory, that'll delete and re-initialize the related workspace.

Alternative usage option: jump into a prepared Shell

This solution works for most shells, but there are exceptions, like fish. The reason is: gows creates a symlink between your project and the isolated workspace. In Bash and most shells if you cd into a symlink directory (e.g. cd my/symlink-dir) your pwd will point to the symlink path (.../my/symlink-dir), but a few shells (fish for example) change the path to the symlink target path instead, which means that when go gets the current path that will point to your project's original path, instead of to the symlink inside the isolated workspace. Which, at that point, is outside of GOPATH.

In shells which keep the working directory path to point to the symlink's path, instead of it's target (e.g. Bash) you can run:

gows bash

or

gows bash -l

which will start a shell (in this example Bash) with prepared GOPATH and your working directory will be set to the symlink inside the isolated workspace.

If you want to use this mode you'll have to change how you initialize your GOPATH, to allow it to be overwritten by gows for "shell jump in". To allow gows to overwrite the GOPATH for shells initialized by/through gows you should change your GOPATH init entry in your ~/.bash_profile / ~/.bashrc (or wherever you did set GOPATH for your shell). For Bash (~/.bash_profile / ~/.bashrc) you can use this form:

if [ -z "$GOPATH" ] ; then
  export GOPATH="/my/go/path"
fi

instead of this one:

export GOPATH="/my/go/path"

This means that your (Bash) shell will only set the GOPATH environment if it's not set to a value already.

This is not required if you use gows only in a "single command / prefix" style, it's only required if you want to initialize the shell and jump into the initialized shell through gows. In general it's safe to initialize the environment variable this way even if you don't plan to initialize any shell through gows, as this will always initialize GOPATH unless it's already initialized (e.g. by an outer shell).

gows commands

You can get the list of available commands by running: gows --help, and command specific help by running: gows COMMAND --help

• gows version : Print the version of gows.
• gows init [--reset] [go-package-name] : Initialize a workspace for the current directory.
  • If called without a go-package-name parameter gows will try to determine the package name from git remote (git remote get-url origin).
  • For more help see: gows init --help.
• gows workspaces : List registered gows projects -> workspaces path pairs

Technical Notes, how gows works behind the scenes

When you call gows init in your project's directory (wherever it is), gows creates an empty Go Workspace for it in ~/.bitrise-gows/wsdirs/, and registers your project's path in ~/.bitrise-gows/workspaces.yml, so that the same workspace (inside ~/.bitrise-gows/wsdirs/) can be assigned for it every time.

When you run any gows command from your project's directory, gows will symlink the project directory into the related ~/.bitrise-gows/wsdirs/... Workspace directory before running the command. Additionally gows will symlink your original GOPATH/bin into the workspace in ~/.bitrise-gows/wsdirs/..., so that if you go install something that'll create the binary in your GOPATH/bin, not just inside the isolated Workspace.

Once the symlinks are in place gows will also set two environments for the command, GOPATH and PWD, to point to the isolated workspace and the project path inside it.

A step by step example about how the directory structure is built:

$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/bitrise-io/gows

$ ls -alh ~/.bitrise-gows/
ls: ~/.bitrise-gows/: No such file or directory

$ gows init
...
Successful init - gows is ready for use!

$ tree -L 5 ~/.bitrise-gows/wsdirs/
~/.bitrise-gows/wsdirs/
└── gows-1464900642
    └── src

2 directories, 0 files

$ ls -l1 ~/.bitrise-gows/
workspaces.yml
wsdirs

# the first `gows` command you run creates the symlinks
# inside the related workspace, in `~/.bitrise-gows/wsdirs/`
$ gows pwd
~/.bitrise-gows/wsdirs/gows-1464900642/src/github.com/bitrise-io/gows

$ tree -L 5 ~/.bitrise-gows/wsdirs/
~/.bitrise-gows/wsdirs/
└── gows-1464900642
    ├── bin -> ~/develop/go/bin
    └── src
        └── github.com
            └── bitrise-io
                └── gows -> ~/develop/go/src/github.com/bitrise-io/gows

TODO

• Setup the base code (generate the template project, e.g. create a new Xcode project or rails new)

  • commit & push

• Add linter tools

  • go:
    • go test
    • go vet
    • errcheck
    • golint

• Write tests & base functionality, BDD/TDD preferred

• Setup continuous integration (testing) on bitrise.io

• Setup continuous deployment for the project - just add it to the existing bitrise.io config

• Use releaseman to automate the release and CHANGELOG generation

• Iterate on the project (and on the automation), test the automatic deployment

• Add (r)sync mode as an option - as a workaround for "shell jump in" usage mode in Shells which don't work with the symlink based mode (e.g. fish)

  • allow it to be specified in the gows.yml
  • add commands: sync-in and sync-back, in case you want to sync with an already open shell (e.g. you changed the code in the Project dir), and to be able to sync-back in case you missed to add the -sync-back flag to the original command

• Option to disable GOPATH/bin symlinking. Once this

  • configurable in gows.yml
  • it should be able to handle if the user changes the option - should remove the symlink / dir and create the dir / symlink instead