Athens

This is a very early alpha release, and the API will be changing as the proxy API changes. Do not run this in production. This warning will be changed or removed as the project and the proxy API changes.

Athens is a proxy server for vgo modules. It implements the download protocol specified here (under "Download Protocol"), and a few additional API endpoints to make it more useful. See API.md for more information.

Architecture

Athens is composed roughly of three logical pieces. The below list contains links to a description of each:

• Module proxy
• Module registry
• CLI

Development

The server is written using Buffalo, so it's fairly straightforward to get started on development. You'll need Buffalo v0.11.0 or later to do devlopment on Athens.

Download v0.11.0 or later, untar/unzip the binary into your PATH, and then run the following from the root of this repository:

buffalo dev

You'll see some output in your console that looks like this:

$ buffalo dev
buffalo: 2018/02/25 16:09:36 === Rebuild on: :start: ===
buffalo: 2018/02/25 16:09:36 === Running: go build -v -i -o tmp/vgoprox-build  (PID: 94067) ===
buffalo: 2018/02/25 16:09:37 === Building Completed (PID: 94067) (Time: 1.115613079s) ===
buffalo: 2018/02/25 16:09:37 === Running: tmp/vgoprox-build (PID: 94078) ===
time="2018-02-25T16:09:37-08:00" level=info msg="Starting application at 127.0.0.1:3000"
INFO[2018-02-25T16:09:37-08:00] Starting Simple Background Worker

Webpack is watching the files…

After the Starting application at 127.0.0.1:3000 is logged, the server is up and running. As you edit and save code, Buffalo will automatically restart the server. This means that all of your modules will disappear because the only storage driver is in-memory right now.

See CLI for information on how to add modules back into the server.

Dependencies

To run the development server, or run tests (tip: run make test to easily run tests), you'll need a running MongoDB server. We plan to add more service dependencies in the future, so we are using Docker and Docker Compose to create and destroy development environments.

To create, run the following from the repository root:

docker-compose up -d

To destroy:

docker-compose down

Contributing

This project is early and there's plenty of interesting and challenging work to do.

If you find a bug or want to fix a bug, I ❤️ PRs and issues!

Below is a list of general areas that I'm planning to work on, so if you'd like to help there ping me or file an issue (I am 'arschles' on the Gophers Slack):

• New storage backends (probably disk next because it's the easiest on the TODO list 😄)
• Adding new commands to the CLI (I'll probably use Cobra to do it)
• Bugfixes in the CLI
• Adding tests

The only thing I ask is that you follow the Contributor Covenant.

Resources:

• "Go and Versioning" papers
• vgo wiki

Does it Work?

Great question (especially for an alpha project)! The short answer is this:

The basic pieces are in place for a proxy, but the CLI and the server makes it near-impossible to use this thing in the real world

Some Additional Details

The basic API and storage system work, but the proxy is limited for real world use right now.

First, it only stores modules in memory, so that's a major issue if you want to use it for anything real.

Second, it doesn't hold any packages other than the ones you upload to it. A package proxy is pretty much only as useful as the packages it stores. You can work around that by declaring dependencies as file:/// URLs if you want, but that defeats much of the purpose of this project.

When athens has better storage drivers (at least persistent ones!), it'll be easier to load it up with modules (i.e. by running a background job to crawl your GOPATH). At that point, it'll be more practical to successfully run vgo get inside a less-trivial project.

Finally, here's what the whole workflow looks like in the real world (spoiler alert: the CLI needs work). The setup:

• First, I uploaded a basic module to the server using the CLI (see above) using the following command from the root of this repo: console ./athens ./testmodule arschles.com testmodule v1.0.0
• Then I created a new module with the following files in it:
  • A single go.mod file with only the following line in it: module "foo.bar/baz"
  • A main.go file with the following in it:

package main
func main() {}

Finally, from the root of the new module, I ran vgo get arschles.com/testmodule@v1.0.0 and got the following output:

$ vgo get arschles.com/testmodule@v1.0.0
vgo: downloading arschles.com/testmodule v1.0.0
vgo: import "arschles.com/testmodule": zip for arschles.com/testmodule@v1.0. has unexpected file testmodule/.DS_Store

As you can see, the CLI uploaded a file to athens that's not .go, go.mod, or anything else that vgo, so at least the CLI needs some work (and the server needs some sanity checks too).

You can get around all of this by manually zipping up your code and uploading it with curl or similar, but like I said, that's super impractical. Yay alpha software!