Installation & Setup¶

Installing Go¶

The first thing we need is a working Go installation on our system. The following instructions were derived from the official Getting Started documentation.

Binary Packages¶

Binary distributions of Go are available for the FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X, NetBSD, and Windows operating systems from the official downloads page.

Building from Source¶

Many developers prefer to install Go directly from the source code. Building is easy and quick - the Go compiler and tool chain can be compiled in a matter of minutes on even a modest workstation or laptop.

Install Build Tools¶

The Go tool chain is written in C. To build it, you need a C compiler installed. You will also need the Mercurial DVCS tool to download the source. On Ubuntu run the following command to install the necessary packages:

$ sudo apt-get install gcc libc6-dev mercurial

See Installing Go from source and Install C tools for build instructions on other platforms.

Fetch the repository¶

Go will install to a directory named go. Change to the directory that will be its parent and make sure the go directory does not exist. Then check out the repository:

$ hg clone -u release https://code.google.com/p/go

Build Go¶

To build the Go distribution, run

$ cd go/src
$ ./all.bash

If all goes well, it will finish by printing output like:

ALL TESTS PASSED

---
Installed Go for linux/amd64 in /home/you/go.
Installed commands in /home/you/go/bin.
*** You need to add /home/you/go/bin to your $PATH. ***

where the details on the last few lines reflect the operating system, architecture, and root directory used during the install.

Environment Variables¶

These instructions assume Go is installed at ~/go. If you installed elsewhere, change the commands to reflect your actual installation path.

The Go tools look for several environment variables. Typically these are set in your shell profile. If you are using Bash, add the following lines to your ~/.bashrc:

export GOBIN=~/go/bin
export GOARCH=amd64
export GOOS=linux
export GOROOT=~/go

PATH¶

You probably also want to add the path to your go/bin directory to your PATH:

export PATH=$PATH:/home/you/go/bin

Reload your ~/.bashrc file to active the new environment variables. Once the go binary is on your PATH, you can confirm your install is working correctly by running the go version command.

$ go version
go version go1.1.1 linux/amd64

GOPATH¶

The GOPATH environment variable is used to specify directories outside of $GOROOT that contain Go source code. Typically GOPATH is set to the root of a workspace.

See Project Layout for more detail.

Intellij IDE¶

Go bindings are available for many popular programming editors and IDEs. As Go is still a relatively young language, none of these bindings are as full-featured as those for a mature language like Java. However a good integrated development environment, even if not perfect, is still a valuable tool.

Currently (July 2013) the IDE with the best Go support is Intellij IDEA.

Download¶

Download the Free community edition of Intellij IDEA appropriate for your platform from the official download page.

Untar the downloaded tarball, descend into the resulting folder, and start Intellij by running:

$ ./bin/idea.sh

Install Go Plugin¶

Open the Settings window (File -> Settings) and go to Plugins under IDE Settings. Click on Browse repositories, and type “golang” into the search form. There should be only one result, “golang.org support”. Double-click on it to install, and close the settings. You will be prompted to restart Intellij.

If you like vi-keys, you may also wish to install the IdeaVim plugin.