During my day job I’ve been working on re-factoring some the internals of Juju to reverse the trend of a growing number of dependencies in our core packages.
In this post I’ll show how I used go list
to help me in this task.
The basics
Let’s start with the basics of go list
. The default invocation of go list
returns the name of the import path that represents the directory you are currently in, or the package path you provide.
% cd $GOPATH/src/code.google.com/p/go.crypto/ssh % go list code.google.com/p/go.crypto/ssh % go list github.com/juju/juju github.com/juju/juju
By itself this doesn’t appear to be particularly notable, however this simple example belies the power of go list.
The secret of the -f
flag
Tucked away at the top of the documentation for go help list
is this short piece
The
-f
flag specifies an alternate format for the list, using the syntax of package template. The default output is equivalent to-f '{{.ImportPath}}'
.
Put simply, -f
allows you to execute a Go template which has access to the internal data structures of the go
tool, same structures that are used when build
ing, test
ing or get
ting code.
This example, using -f '{{ .ImportPath }}',
is equivalent to the previous invocation and gives us a glimpse into the power of go list
% go list -f '{{ .ImportPath }}' github.com/juju/juju github.com/juju/juju
Going a step further with go list
The godoc for cmd/go
lists the structures available to -f
, so I won’t repeat them verbatim. Instead I’ll highlight some uses of go list
.
Listing the test files that will be built
% go list -f '{{ .TestGoFiles }}' archive/tar [reader_test.go tar_test.go writer_test.go]
Or the external test files of that package
% go list -f '{{ .XTestGoFiles }}' archive/tar [example_test.go]
Or a summary for a set of packages
% go list -f '{{.Name}}: {{.Doc}}' code.google.com/p/go.net/ipv{4,6} ipv4: Package ipv4 implements IP-level socket options for the Internet Protocol version 4. ipv6: Package ipv6 implements IP-level socket options for the Internet Protocol version 6.
Conditional builds and build tags
A important part of writing Go programs is dealing with portability issues across various operating systems or processors. I’ve written about conditional builds before, so I’ll just show an example listing the files that will be compiled on various platforms
% env GOOS=darwin go list -f '{{ .GoFiles }}' github.com/pkg/term [term.go term_bsd.go] % env GOOS=linux go list -f '{{ .GoFiles }}' github.com/pkg/term [term.go term_linux.go]
Who depends on what?
go list
can show both the packages that your package directly depends, or its complete set of transitive dependencies.
% go list -f '{{ .Imports }}' github.com/davecheney/profile [io/ioutil log os os/signal path/filepath runtime runtime/pprof] % go list -f '{{ .Deps }}' github.com/davecheney/profile [bufio bytes errors fmt io io/ioutil log math os os/signal path/filepath reflect runtime runtime/pprof sort strconv strings sync sync/atomic syscall text/tabwriter time unicode unicode/utf8 unsafe]
The first command lists only the packages that github.com/davecheney/profile
depends on directly. This is the unique set of import
statements in all Go files, adjusted for build constraints. The second command returns the set of direct and transitive dependency of github.com/davecheney/profile
.
Fancy templating
The set of data structures available to the go list
template is quite specialised, but don’t forget we have the whole power of the Go template package at our disposal.
In the previous examples dealing with slices of values, the default output format follows the fmt
package. However it is probably more convenient for scripting applications to have one entry per line, which we can do easily as the go list
template contains a function called join
which delegates to strings.Join.
% go list -f '{{ join .Imports "\n" }}' github.com/davecheney/profile io/ioutil log os os/signal path/filepath runtime runtime/pprof
Putting it together
With the task of trying to unpick the forest of dependencies in our core packages, I can use go list
to define a helper like
deps() { go list -f '{{ join .Deps "\n"}}' . | grep juju }
The usage is as simple as navigating to a particular package in my $GOPATH
and checking to see its complete dependency list
% deps github.com/juju/cmd github.com/juju/errgo github.com/juju/errors github.com/juju/gojsonpointer github.com/juju/gojsonreference github.com/juju/gojsonschema github.com/juju/juju/api/agent ... // many more lines elided
Conclusion
This short post has barely scratched the surface of the flexibility that go list
provides.
If your development, build, or CI tooling is using hand rolled scripts, grep, awk, etc, to introspect Go packages and their interdependencies, consider switching to go list
.
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