Developing Golang Package, cannot use relative path

Question

I'm trying to develop a simple golang package

let's say its name is "Hello", the directory structure is like below

hello
   games
   game-utils

then in hello.go (the main code) I have these:

import (
    gameUtils "./game-utils"
    "./games"
)

ok this worked well until I push to remote repo(e.g github.com) and try to use go get to install it. The problem was with the import path, I must change it to

import (
    gameUtils "github.com/user/hello/game-utils"
    "github.com/user/hello/games"
)

the question is, everytime I develop the package I cannot import using "github.com/user/hello/game-utils" because obviously I wouldn't have pushed it to the remote repo, I need to import it using "./game-utils".

Is there any elegant way to fix this issue?

Answer 1

Read this.

You should always import it using:

import "github.com/user/hello/game-utils"

This is because of how the go tool works. It will look for it on the local machine in the directory: "GOPATH/src/github.com/user/hello/game-utils". As @JimB points out, the compiler always works with the local sources and the import paths are relative to GOPATH/src.

The go get tool is the only one that looks for the sources on the internet. After getting them, it downloads them to "GOPATH/src/IMPORT_PATH" so the compiler and the other tools can now see them in their local structure.

If you are creating a new project you should respect the same directory structure. If you are planning to upload your code to github then create manually the folder "GOPATH/src/github.com/YOUR-GITHUB-USER/PROYECT-NAME" and then initialize your git repo in there. (This works at least on git, hg, svn and github, bitbucket and google code)