Let's take an example. The command below will do:
go get robpike.io/ivy
This will get me the content of the repository under $GOPATH/src. Great!
Now, how does it work?
First, robpike.io/ivy replies with a HTTP-redirect:
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
<a href="http://godoc.org/robpike.io/ivy">Found</a>
From reading at go help importpath, I learn that:
If the import path is not a known code hosting site and also lacks a version control qualifier, the go tool attempts to fetch the import over https/http and looks for a tag in the document's HTML
However, looking for a metatag inside the content of the redirected page using:
curl -D --raw https://godoc.org/robpike.io/ivy | grep go-import
returns nothing.
Reading further:
The repo-root is the root of the version control system containing a scheme and not containing a .vcs qualifier.
For example,
import "example.org/pkg/foo"
will result in the following requests:
https://example.org/pkg/foo?go-get=1 (preferred)
http://example.org/pkg/foo?go-get=1 (fallback, only with -insecure)
Again:
curl -D --raw https://robpike.io/ivy?go-get=1
returns nothing.
So the question is: how can I do the same thing as Mr. Rob Pike and use my own site with the go get command?
That last command you entered does return data. When I run curl -D --raw https://robpike.io/ivy\?go-get\=1 in my terminal, I get the following data back:
<meta name="go-import" content="robpike.io/toy git https://github.com/robpike/toy.git"><meta name="go-import" content="robpike.io/cmd/translate git https://github.com/robpike/translate.git"><meta name="go-import" content="robpike.io/cmd/freq git https://github.com/robpike/freq.git"><meta name="go-import" content="robpike.io/cmd/hira git https://github.com/robpike/hira.git"><meta name="go-import" content="robpike.io/cmd/kana git https://github.com/robpike/kana.git"><meta name="go-import" content="robpike.io/cmd/kata git https://github.com/robpike/kata.git"><meta name="go-import" content="robpike.io/nihongo git https://github.com/robpike/nihongo.git"><meta name="go-import" content="robpike.io/cmd/typo git https://github.com/robpike/typo.git"><meta name="go-import" content="robpike.io/filter git https://github.com/robpike/filter.git"><meta name="go-import" content="robpike.io/cmd/unicode git https://github.com/robpike/unicode.git"><meta name="go-import" content="robpike.io/cmd/doc git https://github.com/robpike/doc.git"><meta name="go-import" content="robpike.io/cmd/scrub git https://github.com/robpike/scrub.git"><meta name="go-import" content="robpike.io/cmd/strings git https://github.com/robpike/strings.git"><meta name="go-import" content="robpike.io/ivy git https://github.com/robpike/ivy.git"><meta name="go-import" content="robpike.io/cmd/now git https://github.com/robpike/now.git">
Ths allows the go get command to resolve the vanity path to git repositories.
The command curl -D --raw 'https://robpike.io/ivy?go-get=1' returns an HTML document containing the tag
<meta name="go-import" content="robpike.io/ivy git https://github.com/robpike/ivy.git">
The go get command uses this meta tag to resolve the vanity import path to an actual git repository. You can do the same.