How to properly set-up go dependencies for the rpk package?

[Bexanderthebex]

This might be a bit of a dumb question from my end but I am a bit new from the go ecosystem as well so bare with me. I want to open a PR to be able to statically define a port for rpk upon startup but I am having some difficulty properly setting up the package dependencies.

So the assumptions are, when one runs go mod vendor on the src/go/rpk directory of the repository, go will automatically install all the dependencies and I will not see any uncommitted changes. But this is not true for my case, go installs the required dependencies and untracked files show up in git status. Another problem I am having is go is not properly resolving import paths. Already tried to add the directory to the import path and confirmed that go is looking into the path for imports but same problem. I have other projects in the directory to which the redpanda repo is cloned but all of them works just fine. Not really sure what the problem here is.

Posting my go env to further help me in resolving this.

GO111MODULE=""
GOARCH="amd64"
GOBIN="/Users/melbexdeleon/go/bin"
GOCACHE="/Users/melbexdeleon/Library/Caches/go-build"
GOENV="/Users/melbexdeleon/Library/Application Support/go/env"
GOEXE=""
GOEXPERIMENT=""
GOFLAGS=""
GOHOSTARCH="amd64"
GOHOSTOS="darwin"
GOINSECURE=""
GOMODCACHE="/Users/melbexdeleon/go/pkg/mod"
GONOPROXY="github.com/alpacahq"
GONOSUMDB="github.com/alpacahq"
GOOS="darwin"
GOPATH="/Users/melbexdeleon/go"
GOPRIVATE="github.com/alpacahq"
GOPROXY="https://proxy.golang.org,direct"
GOROOT="/usr/local/go"
GOSUMDB="sum.golang.org"
GOTMPDIR=""
GOTOOLDIR="/usr/local/go/pkg/tool/darwin_amd64"
GOVCS=""
GOVERSION="go1.18.1"
GCCGO="gccgo"
GOAMD64="v1"
AR="ar"
CC="clang"
CXX="clang++"
CGO_ENABLED="1"
GOMOD="/Users/melbexdeleon/Desktop/Code stuff/redpanda/src/go/rpk/go.mod"
GOWORK=""
CGO_CFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_CPPFLAGS=""
CGO_CXXFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_FFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_LDFLAGS="-g -O2"
PKG_CONFIG="pkg-config"
GOGCCFLAGS="-fPIC -arch x86_64 -m64 -pthread -fno-caret-diagnostics -Qunused-arguments -fmessage-length=0 -fdebug-prefix-map=/var/folders/4q/bxy7msqn7ll4267jkc71q0fw0000gn/T/go-build862218551=/tmp/go-build -gno-record-gcc-switches -fno-common"

[emaxerrno]

cc: @r-vasquez

[r-vasquez]

Hello @Bexanderthebex, thanks for opening this discussion.

w.r.t dependencies management and mod vendor:

documentation says:

The go mod vendor command constructs a directory named vendor in the main module's root directory that contains copies of all packages needed to support builds and tests of packages in the main module. Packages that are only imported by tests of packages outside the main module are not included.

This will create a vendor/ directory with all the packages that we use in rpk, this is useful in cases when you want to build the project on another machine and don't have internet access, or you want to have all the dependencies for a build in a single file tree, however, we don't have 'vendoring' enabled so we don't keep track of it in git (neither we include it in .gitignore).

We recommend you starting:

1. Using our build script ./build.sh this will run go build underneath and go build will download the modules to module cache (_A local directory storing downloaded modules, located in GOPATH/pkg/mod.)
2. When you make changes, you can run the test using go test ./... in the root of rpk directory.
3. When you are ready to commit you can also run the linter, we use golangci-lint, see instructions here.

w.r.t Import paths the above should help, however, keep in mind 2 things:

1. If you are opening the project in an IDE, open the project in rpk directory (src/go/rpk/) might be beneficial (less configuration).
2. You have go v1.18.1 and we use v1.17.

Let me know if this solves your problems or if you need anything else.

[Bexanderthebex]

@r-vasquez thank you for your patience and reply, this works! thank you.