How do I import a specific version of a package using go get?

Really surprised nobody has mentioned gopkg.in.

gopkg.in is a service that provides a wrapper (redirect) that lets you express versions as repo urls, without actually creating repos. E.g. gopkg.in/yaml.v1 vs gopkg.in/yaml.v2, even though they both live at https://github.com/go-yaml/yaml

• gopkg.in/yaml.v1 redirects to https://github.com/go-yaml/yaml/tree/v1
• gopkg.in/yaml.v2 redirects to https://github.com/go-yaml/yaml/tree/v2

This isn't perfect if the author is not following proper versioning practices (by incrementing the version number when breaking backwards compatibility), but it does work with branches and tags.

Go 1.11 will have a feature called go modules and you can simply add a dependency with a version. Follow these steps:

go mod init .
go mod edit -require github.com/wilk/[email protected]
go get -v -t ./...   
go build
go install 

Here's more info on that topic - https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/Modules