When developing with Go on a team, it is useful to have a good branching strategy so you can work together as a team and not tromp on each others changes.
But how do you use Go modules with a branching strategy? It’s easy to refer to another project (even at a certain version) – but branches seem to offer a bit of a challenge.
The official guidance involves using the specific commit hash for the module you want, like this:
go get github.com/someone/some_module@af044c0995fe
Or hand-editing the go.mod file to include that specific commit hash, like this:
module /my/module
require (
...
github.com/someone/some_module v0.0.0-20181121201909-af044c0995fe
...
)
But finding that hash can be tricky sometimes. And what if you just want to make the substituion temporarily using the replace syntax in go.mod?
Lucky for us, there is a simpler solution: Use the branch name when using the replace directive. It looks like this at the bottom of your go.mod file:
replace github.com/owner/repo-name => github.com/owner/repo-name branch-name
Notice the space between the repo and the branch name – that’s important.
If you try to do a go install ./... on the project, go will prompt you to do a go mod tidy.
When you do this, go automatically updates the replace directive to use the appropriate semver version instead of the branch name!
Now the go.mod line will look like this:
replace github.com/owner/repo-name => github.com/owner/repo-name v1.36.1-0.20221130164838-4a00d9d3a2fa
It’s so handy!