Setting Up

December 28, 2018

Hardware, OS and Shell

I’m using a MacBook Pro which is running MacOS Mojave (10.14.2). My shell of choice is Z, made all glorious by oh-my-zsh.

Installation

I downloaded the latest binary release (go1.11.4) from the Golang site and installed it at the default location (/usr/local/go).

I tested my install by following the documentation at golang.org.

Configuration

Based on a recommendation from a friend I started to follow the steps laid out in “How to Start a Go Project in 2018”.

This entailed;

Explicitly setting the GOPATH environment variable explicitly (I added export $GOPATH="/Users/[my username]/go" to the bottom of my ~/.zshrc file),

Adding the $GOPATH/bin directory to my $PATH (I added export PATH="$PATH:$(go env GOPATH)/bin" to the bottom of my ~/.zshrc file).

It seems that the defaults of this setup has changed over the course of Golang’s evolution because an old book I have from 2012; “The Way to Go” by Ivo Balbert; mentions a bunch of other variables which are still in the go environment but seem to have less precedence. Ivo also wants me to have my Golang programs in a different location, and finally, he kicks everything off by cloning the language source and building it. Luckily this isn’t mandatory.

IDE

At the time of writing, it seems as if Visual Studio code has the best free support for Golang. I’ve installed that and will be trying to use it as my primary dev environment.

However, I’m typically a JetBrains user, so I might end up installing their Go plugin too if things-Msft prove to be a brain melt.