Go get

Internal

• go tool

Overview

The get command downloads packages and installs them, possibly updating a local obsolete version. It does that by connecting to the remote repository that maintains the package source code and downloading the source tree locally. get is the preferred way to update go.mod with a new dependency:

go.mod | go get

Once go.mod has been updated by go get, the package's import pat can be used in the project's import statements.

go get is sensitive to the Git configuration present in ~/.gitconfig, especially repository configuration:

[url "git@github.example.com:some-repo"]
       insteadOf = https://github.example.com/some-repo

The shared flags described here apply:

Shared Flags

Problems with get

The import statement drives go get but the import statement does not contain sufficient information to identify which revision of a package should be fetched any time go get is called. The possibility that go get can fetch a different version of code for any given package at any time makes supporting the Go tooling in any reproducible solution complicated and tedious.

Options

-u

The -u flag instructs get to update modules providing dependencies of packages named on the command line to use newer minor or patch releases when available.

-d

Stop after downloading the package, do not install the package.

-f

Only valid when -u is set, forces get -u not to verify that each package has been checked out from the source control repository implied by its import path. This can be useful if the source is a local fork of the original.

-fix

Run the fix tool on the downloaded packages before resolving dependencies or building the code.

-t

Also download the packages required to build the tests for the specified packages.