Package management

In the days of yore, all programs were written from scratch—every utility function and every library to run the code had to written by hand. Now a days, we don't want to deal with the low level details on a regular basis; it would be unimaginable to write all the required libraries and utilities from scratch. Go comes with a rich library, which will be enough for most of our needs. However, it is possible that we might need a few extra libraries or features not provided by the standard library. Such libraries should be available on the internet, and we can download and add them into our project to start using them.

In the previous section, GOPATH, we discussed how all our projects are saved into qualified paths of the $GOPATH/src/git-server.com/user-name/my-go-project form. This is true for any and all dependencies we might have. There are multiple ways to handle dependencies in Go. Let's look at some of them.