I initialise a go project by running:
go mod init firstgo_app
I confirmed the module was created:
cat go.mod
module firstgo_app
go 1.18
Then I installed a dependency on github.com/gin-gonic/gin by executing
get github.com/gin-gonic/gin
after which I viewed the content of go.mod and this time it looks like this:
cat go.mod
module firstgo_app
go 1.18
require (
github.com/gin-contrib/sse v0.1.0 // indirect
github.com/gin-gonic/gin v1.7.7 // indirect
github.com/go-playground/locales v0.13.0 // indirect
github.com/go-playground/universal-translator v0.17.0 // indirect
github.com/go-playground/validator/v10 v10.4.1 // indirect
github.com/golang/protobuf v1.3.3 // indirect
github.com/json-iterator/go v1.1.9 // indirect
github.com/leodido/go-urn v1.2.0 // indirect
github.com/mattn/go-isatty v0.0.12 // indirect
github.com/modern-go/concurrent v0.0.0-20180228061459-e0a39a4cb421 // indirect
github.com/modern-go/reflect2 v0.0.0-20180701023420-4b7aa43c6742 // indirect
github.com/ugorji/go/codec v1.1.7 // indirect
golang.org/x/crypto v0.0.0-20200622213623-75b288015ac9 // indirect
golang.org/x/sys v0.0.0-20200116001909-b77594299b42 // indirect
gopkg.in/yaml.v2 v2.2.8 // indirect
)
What I do not get is the fact that all the dependency has been tagged as indirect. My understanding is that it is only transitive dependency that are tagged indirect but the dependency I directly depend upon should not be tagged as such. That is github.com/gin-gonic/gin v1.7.7 // indirect should not have the indirect tag since this is the dependency I specifically downloaded.
I thought this was the case because I am not directly using the dependency, so I recreated the module again but also created a main.go file where I explicitly depend on gonic/gin:
cat main.go
package main
import "github.com/gin-gonic/gin"
func main() {
r := gin.Default()
r.GET("/ping", func(c *gin.Context) {
c.JSON(200, gin.H{
"message": "pong",
})
})
r.Run() // listen and serve on 0.0.0.0:8080
}
When I try to build it fails with:
go build
main.go:2:8: no required module provides package github.com/gin-gonic/gin; to add it:
go get github.com/gin-gonic/gin
but when I run go get github.com/gin-gonic/gin and then build, all the dependency in go.mod are still tagged indirect.
So what gives? What am I missing here? Or do I understand the indirect wrongly?