Pulling in a Go Dependency From a Fork, Branch, or Github PR using Glide

While writing a Go app, I decided to use Glide as the dependency management system (I tried Godep first, but even on the first day of using it, my dependencies were getting screwed up, lost, builds would mysteriously break - so I decided to switch to Glide, which seems much better).

I was using the Hawkular Go Client library because I needed to write metric data to Hawkular Metrics. So in my glide.yaml, I had this:

- package: github.com/hawkular/hawkular-client-go
  subpackages:
  - metrics

Which simply tells Glide that I want to use the latest master of the client library (I'm not using a versioned library yet. I guess I should start doing that).

Anyway, I needed to add a feature to the Hawkular Go Client. So I forked the git repository, created a branch in my fork where I implemented the new feature, and submitted a Github pull request from my own branch. Rather than wait for the PR to be merged, I wanted Glide to pull in my own branch in my forked repo so I could immediately begin using the new feature. It was as simple as adding three lines to my glide.yaml and running "glide update":

- package: github.com/hawkular/hawkular-client-go
  repo: git@github.com:jmazzitelli/hawkular-client-go.git
  vcs: git
  ref: issue-8
  subpackages:
  - metrics

This tells Glide that the Hawkular Go client package is now located at a different repository (my fork located at github.com) under a branch called "issue-8".

Running "glide update" pulled in the Hawkuar Go client from my fork's branch and placed it in my vendors/ directory. I can now start using my new feature in my Go app without waiting for the PR to be merged. Once the PR is merged, I can remove those three lines, "glide update" again, and things should be back to normal.