Go Lang Installation

Prerequisutes

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go supports a wide range of operating systems. There are two ways go can be installed on the system.

• Binaries
• Building it from the source

I am installing it on MacBook Pro with macOS Mojave v10.14.4 for this tutorial using the Mac binaries.

You could get the download link here

As shown in the image above, select the relevant package accoridng to the operating system. I have downloaded the one for Apple macOS.

• Download file

Installation

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The installation is a fairly straight. You could go with the defaults as shown below.

Verification

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To verify if the go has been successfully, it can be verified from the command line

You could use the following commands in the terminal to verfiy.

>>> which go # Returns path where go is installed/usr/local/go/bin/go>>> go version # Returns the version of the go installedgo version go1.12.4 darwin/amd64

If the terminal shows up as the above, then go lang has been successfully installed.

Setting up workspace

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Go follows a different approach to manage the code which requires to setup the project workspace. This means all the go projects should be developed and maintained in the defined workspace.

Steps to setup the workspace

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Open the shell config which is locate in the HOME directory.

NOTE:

• bash_profile or .bashrc for BASH

- .zshrc for Oh my Zsh!

Add the following variables to shell config

>>> export GOPATH=$HOME/<go-workspace> # <go-workspace> is a filler. Fill it with proper path>>> export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin>>> export GOROOT=/usr/local/opt/go/libexec>>> export PATH=$PATH:$GOROOT/bin

• $GOPATH/src : Go Projects source code
• $GOPATH/pkg : Contains imported packages
• $GOPATH/bin : The compiled binaries home

This completes the setup of go. And system is ready for some code.

Comments

[Richard Burk]

Nice article, Krishna! Some things to consider, if you are running the latest version of Go, $GOPATH is not necessary since we have GOMODULES! Yaaay 🥳🎉 however, GOMODULES is not enabled by default, you need to set your environment variable to export GO111MODULE=on See this blog post for more information blog.golang.org/using-go-modules.

[Krishna Tej Ch]

Thanks for pointing out, Richard. I'll update the post shortly. 🙂