How do I import a specific version of a package using go get?

Question

Go 1.11 will have a feature called go modules and you can simply add a dependency with a version. Follow these steps:

go mod init .
go mod edit -require github.com/wilk/[email protected]
go get -v -t ./...   
go build
go install 

Here's more info on that topic - https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/Modules

Really surprised nobody has mentioned gopkg.in.

gopkg.in is a service that provides a wrapper (redirect) that lets you express versions as repo urls, without actually creating repos. E.g. gopkg.in/yaml.v1 vs gopkg.in/yaml.v2, even though they both live at https://github.com/go-yaml/yaml

• gopkg.in/yaml.v1 redirects to https://github.com/go-yaml/yaml/tree/v1
• gopkg.in/yaml.v2 redirects to https://github.com/go-yaml/yaml/tree/v2

This isn't perfect if the author is not following proper versioning practices (by incrementing the version number when breaking backwards compatibility), but it does work with branches and tags.

You can use git checkout to get an specific version and build your program using this version.

Example:

export GOPATH=~/
go get github.com/whateveruser/whateverrepo
cd ~/src/github.com/whateveruser/whateverrepo
git tag -l
# supose tag v0.0.2 is correct version
git checkout tags/v0.0.2
go run whateverpackage/main.go

Glide is a really elegant package management for Go especially if you come from Node's npm or Rust's cargo.

It behaves closely to Godep's new vendor feature in 1.6 but is way more easier. Your dependencies and versions are "locked" inside your projectdir/vendor directory without relying on GOPATH.

Install with brew (OS X)

$ brew install glide

Init the glide.yaml file (akin to package.json). This also grabs the existing imported packages in your project from GOPATH and copy then to the project's vendor/ directory.

$ glide init

Get new packages

$ glide get vcs/namespace/package

Update and lock the packages' versions. This creates glide.lock file in your project directory to lock the versions.

$ glide up

I tried glide and been happily using it for my current project.

Update 18-11-23: From Go 1.11 mod is official experiment. Please see @krish answer.
Update 19-01-01: From Go 1.12 mod is still official experiment. Starting in Go 1.13, module mode will be the default for all development.
Update 19-10-17: From Go 1.13 mod is official package manager.

https://blog.golang.org/using-go-modules

Old answer:

You can set version by offical dep

dep ensure --add github.com/gorilla/[email protected]

A little cheat sheet on module queries.

To check all existing versions: e.g. go list -m -versions github.com/gorilla/mux

1. Specific version @v1.2.8
2. Specific commit @c783230
3. Specific branch @master
4. Version prefix @v2
5. Comparison @>=2.1.5
6. Latest @latest

E.g. go get github.com/gorilla/[email protected]

Nowadays you can just use go get for it. You can fetch your dependency by the version tag, branch or even the commit.

go get github.com/someone/some_module@master
go get github.com/someone/[email protected]
go get github.com/someone/some_module@commit_hash

more details here - How to point Go module dependency in go.mod to a latest commit in a repo?

Go get will also install the binary, like it says in the documentation -

Get downloads the packages named by the import paths, along with their dependencies. It then installs the named packages, like 'go install'.

(from https://golang.org/cmd/go/)