Whats a good best practice with Go workspaces?

Question

I'm just getting into learning Go, and reading through existing code to learn "how others are doing it". In doing so, the use of a go "workspace", especially as it relates to a project's dependencies, seems to be all over the place.

What (or is there) a common best practice around using a single or multiple Go workspaces (i.e. definitions of $GOPATH) while working on various Go projects? Should I be expecting to have a single Go workspace that's sort of like a central repository of code for all my projects, or explicitly break it up and set up $GOPATH as I go to work on each of these projects (kind of like a python virtualenv)?

Answer 1

I think it's easier to have one $GOPATH per project, that way you can have different versions of the same package for different projects, and update the packages as needed.

With a central repository, it's difficult to update a package as you might break an unrelated project when doing so (if the package update has breaking changes or new bugs).

Answer 2

I used to use multiple GOPATHs -- dozens, in fact. Switching between projects and maintaining the dependencies was a lot harder, because pulling in a useful update in one workspace required that I do it in the others, and sometimes I'd forget, and scratch my head, wondering why that dependency works in one project but not another. Fiasco.

I now have just one GOPATH and I actually put all my dev projects - Go or not - within it. With one central workspace, I can still keep each project in its own git repository (src/<whatever>) and use git branching to manage dependencies when necessary (in practice, very seldom).

My recommendation: use just one workspace, or maybe two (like if you need to keep, for example, work and personal code more separate, though the recommended package path naming convention should do that for you).