Getting started with the Go Language

01/04/2014

Here are a few tricks I picked up when trying to get started with go.

Firstly, don’t install Ubuntu’s version of go as you’ll get an old one. Instead, use gvm to install go1.2 or whatever the latest is.

Secondly, be careful to structure your code in the right directory format. If you do not have the correct directory structure it will cause certain errors such as a “cannot find package” error when running “go test”. E.g. if you create a directory named gocode and want to check code out from github into that directory, you must have it in the src/github.com/organization directory such as:

gocode/src/github.com/fsouza/go-dockerclient

You’ll need to add the directory containing all of your Go code to the GOPATH environment variable. E.g. I did this with:

export GOPATH=$GOPATH:/home/${USER}/src/gocode

You’ll also probably want godep installed since many packages use it for managing dependencies:

go get github.com/tools/godep
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