The Go ecosystem has always been federated and completely open. Anyone with a GitHub or GitLab (or any other supported VCS) account can effortlessly provide a library with just a git push
(or similar). No extra accounts to create or credentials to set up.
We feel that Athens should keep the community federated and open, and nobody should have to change their workflow when they’re building apps and libraries. So, to make sure the community can stay federated and open, we’ve made it easy to install Athens for everyone so that:
As you know, go get
and go mod download
will fetch packages directly from version control systems like GitHub. This system has been mostly great for both package developers and the dependent apps, but at the same we’ve suffered from a fundamental problem for a long time.
Code in version control systems can always change even after it’s been committed. For example, a package developer can run git push -f
and overwrite a commit or tag that you depend on in your project. In these cases, you’ll often see checksum verification errors (for example, see here).
Athens prevents these issues by storing code in its own, immutable database. Here’s what happens when you run go get
:
go get
requests a module from Athensgo get
client from (1)Athens never changes anything once it saves a module to storage, so the system has the following two important properties:
go mod download
once per module version. In other words, Athens will only hit step (4) once for any given module & versionWe follow semver. Our Docker images are tagged to indicate stability:
We strongly recommend using a tagged release, e.g. gomods/athens:v0.3.0
, instead of the latest or canary tags.
To make sure it’s easy to install, we try to provide as many ways as possible to install and run Athens: