Call your code from another module
In the previous section, you created a
greetings
module. In this section, you'll write code to make
calls to the Hello
function in the module you just wrote. You'll
write code you can execute as an application, and which calls code in the
greetings
module.
-
Create a
hello
directory for your Go module source code. This is where you'll write your caller.After you create this directory, you should have both a hello and a greetings directory at the same level in the hierarchy, like so:
<home>/ |-- greetings/ |-- hello/
For example, if your command prompt is in the greetings directory, you could use the following commands:
cd .. mkdir hello cd hello
-
Enable dependency tracking for the code you're about to write.
To enable dependency tracking for your code, run the
go mod init
command, giving it the name of the module your code will be in.For the purposes of this tutorial, use
example.com/hello
for the module path.$ go mod init example.com/hello go: creating new go.mod: module example.com/hello
- In your text editor, in the hello directory, create a file in which to write your code and call it hello.go.
-
Write code to call the
Hello
function, then print the function's return value.To do that, paste the following code into hello.go.
package main import ( "fmt" "example.com/greetings" ) func main() { // Get a greeting message and print it. message := greetings.Hello("Gladys") fmt.Println(message) }
In this code, you:
-
Declare a
main
package. In Go, code executed as an application must be in amain
package. -
Import two packages:
example.com/greetings
and thefmt
package. This gives your code access to functions in those packages. Importingexample.com/greetings
(the package contained in the module you created earlier) gives you access to theHello
function. You also importfmt
, with functions for handling input and output text (such as printing text to the console). -
Get a greeting by calling the
greetings
package’sHello
function.
-
Declare a
-
Edit the
example.com/hello
module to use your localexample.com/greetings
module.For production use, you’d publish the
example.com/greetings
module from its repository (with a module path that reflected its published location), where Go tools could find it to download it. For now, because you haven't published the module yet, you need to adapt theexample.com/hello
module so it can find theexample.com/greetings
code on your local file system.To do that, use the
go mod edit
command to edit theexample.com/hello
module to redirect Go tools from its module path (where the module isn't) to the local directory (where it is).-
From the command prompt in the hello directory, run the following
command:
$ go mod edit -replace example.com/greetings=../greetings
The command specifies that
example.com/greetings
should be replaced with../greetings
for the purpose of locating the dependency. After you run the command, the go.mod file in the hello directory should include areplace
directive:module example.com/hello go 1.16 replace example.com/greetings => ../greetings
-
From the command prompt in the hello directory, run the
go mod tidy
command to synchronize theexample.com/hello
module's dependencies, adding those required by the code, but not yet tracked in the module.$ go mod tidy go: found example.com/greetings in example.com/greetings v0.0.0-00010101000000-000000000000
After the command completes, the
example.com/hello
module's go.mod file should look like this:module example.com/hello go 1.16 replace example.com/greetings => ../greetings require example.com/greetings v0.0.0-00010101000000-000000000000
The command found the local code in the greetings directory, then added a
require
directive to specify thatexample.com/hello
requiresexample.com/greetings
. You created this dependency when you imported thegreetings
package in hello.go.The number following the module path is a pseudo-version number -- a generated number used in place of a semantic version number (which the module doesn't have yet).
To reference a published module, a go.mod file would typically omit the
replace
directive and use arequire
directive with a tagged version number at the end.require example.com/greetings v1.1.0
For more on version numbers, see Module version numbering.
-
From the command prompt in the hello directory, run the following
command:
-
At the command prompt in the
hello
directory, run your code to confirm that it works.$ go run . Hi, Gladys. Welcome!
Congrats! You've written two functioning modules.
In the next topic, you'll add some error handling.