Hands-On Software Engineering with Golang

Benefits of vendoring dependencies

First and foremost, the key promise of vendoring is nothing other than the capability to run reproducible builds. Many customers, especially larger corporations, tend to stick to stable or LTS releases for the software they deploy and forego upgrading their systems unless it's absolutely necessary. Being able to check out the exact software version that a customer uses and generate a bit-for-bit identical binary for use in a test environment is an invaluable tool for any field engineer attempting to diagnose and reproduce bugs that the customers are facing.

Another benefit of vendoring is that it serves as a safety net in case an upstream dependency suddenly disappears from the place where it is hosted (for ...