Finding imports and dependencies of a go program

The go list -json command run from the command line will tell you the imports and dependencies of a go program ( in json format). Is there a way to get this information from within a go program I.e at runtime, either by running the 'go list' command somehow or another way?

The following code uses the go/build to get the imports for the application in the current working directory.

p, err := build.Default.Import(".", ".", 0)
if err != nil {
   // handle error
}
for _, i := range p.Imports {
   fmt.Println(i)
}

You can build a list of all dependencies using a simple recursive function.

To get the imports for a specific path, use:

p, err := build.Default.Import(path, ".", 0)
if err != nil {
   // handle error
}
for _, i := range p.Imports {
   fmt.Println(i)
}

I don't think you can do it without using the go binary since go needs to analyze your source code.

It's pretty easy to do but it must have access to go and your source code at run time. Heres a quick example:

package main

import (
	"encoding/json"
	"fmt"
	"os/exec"
)

func main() {
	cmd := exec.Command("go", "list", "-json")
	stdout, err := cmd.Output()
	if err != nil {
		println(err.Error())
		return
	}

	var list GoList
	err = json.Unmarshal(stdout, &list)

	for _, d := range list.Deps {
		fmt.Printf(" - %s\n", d)
	}
}

type GoList struct {
	Dir        string
	ImportPath string
	Name       string
	Target     string
	Stale      bool
	Root       string
	GoFiles    []string
	Imports    []string
	Deps       []string
}

No, I don't think this is possible without the source in a reliable way. Go binaries on different platforms, compiled with different compilers may or may not have (or may not have in the future) these informations compiled in.

But as Go programs are compiled anyway: Why not record this information while you do have access to the source code?