Importing cert-manager in Go

cert-manager is written in Go, and uses Go modules. You can import it as a Go module, and in some cases that's fine or even encouraged, but as a rule we generally recommend against importing cert-manager.

Generally speaking, except for the cases listed below under When You Might Import cert-manager, code in the cert-manager repository is not covered under any Go module compatibility guarantee. We can and will make breaking changes, even in publicly exported Go code and even in a minor or patch release of cert-manager. We have made breaking changes like this in the past.

Note that this doesn't affect running cert-manager. Our commitment on compatibility is to not break the runtime functionality of cert-manager, and we take that seriously.

If you're certain that you do need to import cert-manager as a module, see Module Import Paths below for a note on how to do that.

When You Might Import cert-manager

You might need to import cert-manager if you're writing Go code which:

• uses cert-manager custom resources, so you want to import something under pkg/apis
• implements an external DNS solver webhook, as in the webhook-example
• implements an external issuer, as in the sample-external-issuer

If you think you really need to import other parts of the code, please do reach out and talk to us so we're aware of this need! We'll always try to avoid breakage where we can.

Module Import Paths

For all supported versions of cert-manager, the module import path is github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager.

Historically, the cert-manager repository was created on GitHub as https://github.com/jetstack/cert-manager, and was later migrated to https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager.

This means that the Go module import path you need may be different if you're trying to use an older version of cert-manager.

For cert-manager 1.8 and later, use the new path listed above.

For cert-manager versions older than 1.8 use the old path: github.com/jetstack/cert-manager