Craig Weber

This is a guide for Unix systems (OS X and Linux), but Windows users shouldn't find it too difficult to figure out the equivalent commands for their platform. I'm not assuming much prior knowledge, but readers should at least be comfortable navigating around a Unix terminal, and any familiarity with environment variables is helpful (a quick Google search for "environment variables" should suffice). Without further ado:

1. Download Go

2. If you're on Linux, you'll need to pick an extraction location (the OS X installer should handle this part of the setup automatically). I usually install to ~/.go, but it doesn't matter much. From your terminal, run:

   tar -xvf ~/Downloads/go1.5.3.linux-amd64.tar.gz
   mv go ~/.go
   

   You'll also need to add .go/bin to your $PATH environment variable so you can run the go tool by its name (e.g., go build vs ~/.go/bin/go build). Add this to the bottom of your ~/.bashrc (this file sets up your terminal every time you log in):

   # Add Go to your path
   PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.go/bin
   export $PATH
   

   To load those changes into your shell without having to log out and log back in, you can run: source ~/.bashrc. You should now be able to run go version and see something like: go version go1.5.3 linux/amd64.

3. Setup your $GOPATH. $GOPATH is a colon-delineated list of "workspace" directory paths. A workspace must have a ./src/ subdirectory. When the Go compiler encounters an import path in a source file, it will iterate over each workspace until it finds one that has the import path in its src subdirectory. I recommend keeping a single path in your $GOPATH for simplicity. Windows users will have to Google for "how to set environment variables" to follow along with this article. For OS X and Linux users, add the following to your ~/.bashrc (Linux) or ~/.bash_profile (OS X):

   # Setup $GOPATH
   GOPATH=$HOME/Projects
   export GOPATH
   
   # When a go program is built, it will be added to $GOPATH/bin. In order to
   # run these programs by name, we need to add them to $PATH:
   PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin
   export PATH
   

   Load those changes into your shell via source ~/.bashrc or source ~/.bash_profile, then create the directory: mkdir -p ~/Projects/src.

4. Test our setup with a "hello world" project. Make a directory for your project: mkdir ~/Projects/src/hello, then copy the following into ~/Projects/src/hello/main.go:

   package main
   
   
   import "fmt"
   
   
   func main() {
   	fmt.Println("Hello, world!")
   }
   

   Install it via go install hello, and run it by invoking hello. If you don't see Hello, world!, then something bad happened.