vendorpull

vendorpull is a simple vendoring package manager that takes care of managing a vendor directory in your project.

Why would I want to vendor my dependencies?

Many high-profile projects, such as Node.js and Golang, vendor their dependencies for some of the following reasons:

Including dependencies as part of your git repository ensures that your project continues to work even if the dependencies cannot be resolved anymore, This happens in practice when repositories are moved between hosting providers, their history is re-written, or they are simply taken down
In various types of software projects, making changes to a third party dependency and rapidly testing the application with the corresponding dependency changes requires significant acrobatics and maneuvers involving forking the dependency project, monkey-patching the build system to compile a dependency from a custom location, etc
Strongly separating your application code from the third-party projects that it depends on at the code level makes developers less likely to cross that barrier for debugging purposes. If you depend on a third-party project, then you have as much responsibility over it as over your application code and vendoring encourages that behavior
Some types of projects are not well-suited to a particular package manager. For example, Node.js projects are typically released on npm and Python projects are typically released on pip. However, what is the best way to release a software projects consisting of shell scripts or a dataset of CSV files? You can abuse another package manager to release them or work with them at the version control level using git submodules or a tool like vendorpull

Platform support

vendorpull runs in any POSIX system such as GNU/Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, etc. Its only external dependencies is git. vendorpull can be run in Microsoft Windows through the Windows Subsystem for Linux or MinGW.

Installation

Go to the root of the repository you want to setup vendorpull in and run the following command:

/bin/sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sourcemeta/vendorpull/main/bootstrap -H "Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate")"

The bootstrap script will install vendorpull at vendor/vendorpull and set vendorpull as a dependency in a way such that vendorpull can manage itself.

Managing dependencies

You can declare your dependencies using a simple DEPENDENCIES file where each row corresponds to a repository you want to vendor in your project. For example:

vendorpull https://github.com/jviotti/vendorpull 6a4d9aa9d8ee295151fd4cb0ac59f30f20217a8f
depot_tools https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/tools/depot_tools.git 399c5918bf47ff1fe8477f27b57fa0e8c67e438d
electron https://github.com/electron/electron 68d9adb38870a6ea4f8796ba7d4d9bea2db7b7a0

In this case, we're vendoring vendorpull itself, Chromium's depot_tools, and the Electron project.

The first column defines the dependency name as it will be vendored in the project. The dependency is vendored inside the vendor directory.
The second column defines the repository URL of the dependency
The third column defines the git revision of the project that you want to vendor

In order to pull all dependencies, run the following command:

./vendor/vendorpull/pull

You can also pull a single dependency by specifying its name as the first argument. For example:

./vendor/vendorpull/pull depot_tools

Updating

vendorpull is managed using vendorpull itself and follows the live-at-head philosophy. Therefore you can update vendorpull by updating the vendorpull revision from the DEPENDENCIES file and running the following command:

./vendor/vendorpull/pull vendorpull

Masking

In some cases, vendoring a dependency might incur a significant space overhead in your git repository. In these cases, you might want to ignore certain paths of the vendored repository that you are not interested in, which we refer to as masking.

In order to mask a dependency, you can create a file called vendor/<name>.mask where <name> corresponds to the dependency name as defined in the DEPENDENCIES file. This file contains a set of paths relative to the dependency path that will be removed when vendoring the dependency.

For example, at the time of this writing, the Electron project repository contains an 8.1M docs directory. We can ignore this directory by creating a vendor/electron.mask file whose contents are the following:

docs

If you do not provide a .mask file on the project consuming the dependency, vendorpull will look for a default mask file called vendorpull.mask at the top level of the project you are vendoring.

Patches

Sometimes its necessary to apply a set of patches to a vendored dependency right after pulling it into the project. You can do this automatically by placing a set of *.patch files produced with git-format-patch(1) into a patches/<name> directory where <name> corresponds to a dependency name as defined in the DEPENDENCIES file.

GitHub integration

We recommend adding the following line to .gitattributes to prevent GitHub from automatically rendering files in vendor during upgrade pull requests:

/vendor/** linguist-generated=true

License

This project is licensed under the Apache-2.0 license.