A tool for Go to automate the use of third party package versions in the Google/Camlistore way. It is similar to goven.

Many existing Go package managers provide solutions to the problem of relying on other projects' code. Go handles the use of other packages elegantly, but is prone to problems when that code has breaking changes or is removed from the Internet. As a solution, the FAQ suggests copying any third party repositories into your own project and changing your import paths to match. This is a recursive process, as you must then perform the same procedure for those copied packages and so on, until all leaf packages have no external imports.

party is a tool that performs all of this work. It

1. Rewrites all external imports in both your project and the third_party directory from other.com/user/package to host.com/user/your_project/third_party/other.com/user/package.
2. Updates or copies files from $GOPATH/src/other.com/user/package to $GOPATH/src/host.com/user/your_project/third_party/other.com/user/package.
3. Returns to step 1 until no more rewrites are performed.

1. Install with go get github.com/mjibson/party.
2. From your project's root directory, run party -c.

The -c flag will create the third_party directory if it does not exist. On further uses, invoking party with no arguments is sufficient. This is for protection so that party is not invoked at, say, $GOPATH/src, which would perform path rewriting and file updating for many files. When run without -c, party will fail if third_party does not exist.

A -v flag is available for verbosity. A -n flag is available to perform a dry run, in which no actions are taken.

When working on an App Engine project, use the -r flag. This will cause all third_party imports to be local packages. This is needed because otherwise App Engine will run init() routines from your .go files twice.

To update a third_party package to a newer version, fetch the most recent version of it with go get -u other.com/user/package, and run party again in your project's directory.

goven is a precursor to party, and was useful enough to get a mention in the FAQ. However, goven has suffered from neglect and so has some bugs, lacks features, and is not cross-platform. party strives to be an improvement to goven in all ways.

There is no guarantee that the source directory exists. For example, a package may have a OS-specific file (file_windows.go) which imports another package. On non-Windows, that other package will not have been fetched during go get and will thus not exist. These packages must be fetched using go get or some other method by hand. Or, running party on a Windows machine (in this case) will correctly copy those files. These cases are reported when running party.

party performs the equivalent of gofmt on any files affected by the import rewrite, thus the diff may be somewhat larger than just the import lines.

Third party imports that use local (relative) packages will fail, as those packages are assumed to be part of the standard library. Those packages will not be copied.