Installation

Getting Super Powers

Installing Go is easy, one can visit their download page and download the latest version build for there respective Operating System.

Here are some popular one

Mac OSX

One could use homebrew distribution by running following command in terminal

brew install go

This would automatically take care of all the things needed for installation. Alternatively, here is a direct link for download for OSX

Note: Direct link points to Go v1.14.2 at the time of writing this book. This may be periodically updated, but one is requested not to depend on it for the latest version

Ubuntu 18.04 or higher

Again it is highly recommended that one should install the Golang directly from download page, or by a direct link here

Note: Direct link points to Go v1.14.2 at the time of writing this book. This may be periodically updated, but one is requested not to depend on it for the latest version

Once you have downloaded the gzip file, extract it someplace in your home directory and then add following lines to you $HOME/.bashrc or $HOME/.bash_profile file

export GOROOT=$HOME/bin/go1.14.2.linux-amd64/go
export PATH=$PATH:$GOROOT/bin
export GOPATH=$HOME/code/gocode
export GOBIN=$GOPATH/bin
export PATH=$PATH:$GOBIN

Please replace path with the path you have extracted the zip file into

Here GOROOT points to the parent directory of bin in go folder, then the bin path is extended to PATH variable. GOPATH is where you go get or personal code lives, GOBINpoints to go package or local code binary that gets generated when go code is compiled. We will discuss these at length, later

Or alternatively, If you're using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or 19.10 on amd64, arm64, armhf or i386, then you can use the longsleep/golang-backports PPA and install Go 1.14.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:longsleep/golang-backports
sudo apt update
sudo apt install golang-go

Note **that golang-go installs the latest Go as default Go. If you do not want that, install golang-1.14 instead and use the binaries from /usr/lib/go-1.14/bin

These packages were not created by the Go project, and we don't support them, but they may be useful for you.

Windows

For Microsoft Windows, it is highly recommended that one should install from Golang download page

Instructions

Official binary distributions are available for the FreeBSD (release 10-STABLE and above), Linux, macOS (10.11 and above), and Windows operating systems and the 32-bit (386) and 64-bit (amd64) x86 processor architectures.

If a binary distribution is not available for your combination of operating system and architecture, try installing from source or installing gccgo instead of gc.

System Requirements

Operating System	Architecture	Notes
FreeBSD 10.3 or higher	amd64, i386	Debian GNU/kFreeBSD not supported
Linux 2.6.23 or higher with glibc	amd64, i386, arm arm64, s390x, ppc64le	CentOS/RHEL 5.x not supported. Install from source for other libc
Mac OS 10.11 or higher	amd64	use the clang or gcc† that comes with Xcode^^ for cgo ^ support
Windows 7, Server 2008 R2 or higher	amd64, i386	use MinGW (386) or MinGW-W64 (amd64) gcc^. No need for cygwin or msys.

^ A C compiler is required only if you plan to use cgo. ^^ You only need to install the command-line tools for Xcode. If you have already installed Xcode 4.3+, you can install it from the Components tab of the Downloads preferences panel.

Testing the installation

Now since we are done with installation. Let's test if everything is fine before moving forward. Fire up a terminal on your system and run following command

go version
# OUTPUT: go version go1.14.2 linux/amd64

If everything is fine one should see version output correctly. To test tooling run following command in terminal

gofmt -v
flag provided but not defined: -v
usage: gofmt [flags] [path ...]
  -cpuprofile string
        write cpu profile to this file
  -d    display diffs instead of rewriting files
  -e    report all errors (not just the first 10 on different lines)
  -l    list files whose formatting differs from gofmt's
  -r string
        rewrite rule (e.g., 'a[b:len(a)] -> a[b:]')
  -s    simplify code
  -w    write result to (source) file instead of stdout

If you get something similar without any error. We are good to Go