I’ve come across a folder named vendor in the root of several GitHub repositories, and I’m wondering what its role is.
Could someone explain what this vendor directory is meant for? I often see it in various projects, and I’m unsure about what kind of files should be found there.
Additionally, I’ve heard the term ‘revendoring’ mentioned but I’m not quite clear on what that means. Does it involve updating dependencies or is it something different? I’d really appreciate any insights so I can understand project structures better.
totally agree! vendor dirs do help in keeping versions straight, but they can blow up repo size. some teams prefer committing deps while others lean on npm or pip to keep it lean. it’s all about finding the right balance for your crew.
The vendor directory serves as local storage for third-party dependencies that your project requires. By including these pre-downloaded copies, it eliminates the need to download them each time someone clones your repository, resulting in faster build times and consistent versions across different development environments. Within the vendor directory, you’ll typically find external libraries, frameworks, or modules utilized by the main application. Revendoring refers to the process of refreshing or updating the contents of the vendor directory, which you would do when updating dependency versions, adding new dependencies, or removing those that are no longer needed. This process rebuilds the vendor directory based on the current specifications from the project’s management files. Different programming languages manage this differently; for example, Go has built-in vendor support, while JavaScript often utilizes similar concepts with node_modules, although the latter is usually not committed to version control.
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