Listing Dependencies of Packages

There is a fantastic tool in the Go eco system called go list. This tool uses Go template package and comes with comes a set of predefined template variables we can use to format its output.

Here we will use it to list the dependencies of our local package.

Lets assume we are working on html scrapping package called scrappy

Listing all packages

 $ go list -f '{{ .Imports }}' github.com/cholthi/scrappy
[encoding/json flag fmt github.com/gocolly/colly os os/signal strings syscall]

Those are the packages my scrappy package depend. Some people would like each dependency to appear on its own line. To do that,go list has a template function called join which is just an alias for builtin String.Join

$ go list -f '{{ join .Imports "\n" }}' github.com/cholthi/scrappy
encoding/json
flag
fmt
github.com/gocolly/colly
os
os/signal
strings
syscall

For this and more on go list, check out this good blog post