Installing Golang on MacOS

This guide is what I did to get Golang setup on my Mac machine.

Assumptions

You use the following:

• asdf
• zshrc

Install Golang

From asdf-golang

asdf plugin add golang https://github.com/asdf-community/asdf-golang.git
# install latest golang version
asdf install golang latest

# set the glboal version for golang to latest
asdf global golang latest

# reshim 
asdf reshim golang

Add GOROOT in your shell's initialisation

GOROOT is the environment variable that specifics the location of the Go installation

Add the following to ~/.zshrc

. ~/.asdf/plugins/golang/set-env.zsh

This will ensure that GOROOT and GOPATH is set each time you run your terminal

• GOROOT: specifies location of the Go installation directory (e.g. compiler, linker, standard library)
• GOPATH: specifies location of your workspace. Workspace is a directory hierachy with three directories: src, pkg, bin

You can see what set-env.zsh does:

$ cat ~/.asdf/plugins/golang/set-env.zsh

asdf_update_golang_env() {
  local go_bin_path
  go_bin_path="$(asdf which go 2>/dev/null)"
  if [[ -n "${go_bin_path}" ]]; then
    export GOROOT
    GOROOT="$(dirname "$(dirname "${go_bin_path:A}")")"

    export GOPATH
    GOPATH="$(dirname "${GOROOT:A}")/packages"
  fi
}

autoload -U add-zsh-hook
add-zsh-hook precmd asdf_update_golang_env

Update your currently opened terminal to use latest ~/.zshrc

source ~/.zshrc

Check to see if GOROOT and GOPATH is set

> echo $GOROOT
/Users/username/.asdf/installs/golang/1.22.5/go

> echo $GOPATH
/Users/username/.asdf/installs/golang/1.22.5/packages