Welcome to the Athens project! We are a proxy server for the Go Modules download API.
See our documentation site https://docs.gomods.io for more details on the project.
Development teams at several companies are using Athens in their everyday development workflows.
This means that they are running their own Athens servers, hooking them up to their own storage backends (see here for the list of storage backends that Athens supports), and configuring their local Go development environments to use that Athens server.
We encourage you to try it out, consider using it in your development workflow, and letting us know if you are using it by adding a comment to this GitHub issue.
The proxy implements the Go modules download protocol.
There is currently an experimental public proxy (at https://athens.azurefd.net) that you can use to try out Athens, without installing anything locally. We also have a community of folks using Athens in production inside their organizations as an internal proxy. In either deployment, developers set their GOPROXY environment variable to point to the Athens proxy of their choice. At that point, go get, go build, and more commands will use the proxy to download dependencies as necessary.
Athens proxies are highly configurable, so they can work for lots of different deployments. For example, proxies support a wide variety of storage drivers including:
- Cloud blob storage services
- MongoDB
- Content distribution networks (CDNs)
- Shared disk
- In-memory
See DEVELOPMENT.md for details on how to set up your development environment and start contributing code.
Speaking of contributing, read on!
If you use Athens for your development workflow, we hope that you'll consider contributing back to the project. Athens is widely used and has plenty of interesting work to do, from technical challenges to technical documentation to release management. We have a wonderful community that we would love you to be a part of. Absolutely everyone is welcome.
The quickest way to get involved is by filing issues if you find bugs or find that you need Athens to do something it doesn't.
If you'd like to help us tackle some of the technical / code challenges and you're familiar with the GitHub contribution process, you'll probably be familiar with our process for contributions. You can optionally find or submit an issue, and then submit a pull request (PR) to fix that issue. See here for more of the project-specific details.
If you're not familiar with the standard GitHub contribution process, which Athens mostly follows, please see this section of our documentation to learn how to contribute. You can also take advantage of @bketelsen's great video on how to contribute code. The information in these documents and videos will help you not only with this project, but can also help you contribute to many other projects on GitHub.
If you decide to to contribute but aren't sure what to work on, we have a well maintained list of good first issues that you should look at. If you find one that you would like to work on, please post a comment saying "I want to work on this", and then it's all yours to begin working on.
We do recommend that you choose one of the issues on the above list, but you may also consider a different one from our entire list. Many of the issues on that list are more complex and challenging.
Before you do start getting involved or contributing, we want to let you know that we follow a general philosophy in how we work together, and we'd really appreciate you getting familiar with it before you start.
It's not too long and it's ok for you to "skim" it (or even just read the first two sections 😄), just as long as you understand the spirit of who we are and how we work.
If you're not ready to contribute code yet, there are plenty of other great ways to get involved:
- Come talk to us in the
#athenschannel in the Gophers slack. We’re a really friendly group, so come say hi and join us! Ping me (@arschleson slack) in the channel and I’ll give you the lowdown - Get familiar with the technology. There's lots to read about. Here are some places to start:
- Gentle Introduction to the Project - the basics of why we started this project
- The Download Protocol - the core API that the proxy implements and the
goCLI uses to download packages - Proxy Design - what the proxy is and how it works
- Go modules wiki - context and details on how Go dependency management works in general
- "Go and Versioning" - long articles on Go dependency management details, internals, etc...
The Athens project would not be possible without the amazing projects it builds on. Please see SHOULDERS.md to see a list of them.
We all strive to write nice and readable code which can be understood by every person of the team. To achieve that we follow principles described in Brian's talk Code like the Go team.
This project follows the Contributor Covenant (English version here) code of conduct.
If you have concerns, notice a code of conduct violation, or otherwise would like to talk about something
related to this code of conduct, please reach out @arschles on the Gophers Slack.
Athens banner attributed to Golda Manuel