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I'm trying to understand how to work with Golang and forks. The situation is the following, I'm writing a library project which depends on library github.com/other/some_dependency, which isn't mine.

Because some_dependency is missing some methods that I need, I fork it to github.com/me/some_dependency. However, I can't just do go get github.com/me/some_dependency, the library references itself so it breaks.

In this article they give a possible solution:

 go get github.com/other/some_dependency
 cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/other/some_dependency
 git remote add fork git@github.com:me/some_dependency
 git rebase fork/master

Now, this is hacky at best. There is no way from the code of the library to know that the dependency is coming from a different repo. Anyone doing go get of my library wouldn't manage to make it work.

As dep is expected to be the official dependency manager. I've found how to fix the version:

dep ensure -add github.com/foo/bar@v1.0.0

But I cannot find how to set a different remote. Is is possible to do it? As an example, in Node.js with npm it is dead simple:

npm install git+https://git@github.com/visionmedia/express.git
Gabriel Furstenheim
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1 Answers1

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If you look at the help you will see this:

<import path>[:alt source URL][@<constraint>]

So to add github.com/foo/bar from location github.com/fork/bar you have to add it like this:

dep ensure -add github.com/foo/bar:github.com/fork/bar

The source location will be added as source attribute in the Gopkg.toml.

Gopkg docs for dependency rules constraint and override

Fabian N.
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Arjan
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