Installation of Go on Linux (golang)
The programming language Go is a compiled, statically typed language that uses a concurrency mechanism capable of making the most of multi-core and network architectures, also allowing the construction of flexible and modular programs. Go was created in 2009 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, the latter also being the creator of the B language (predecessor of C). Some well-known applications have been created in Go such as Docker, Kubernetes and Ethereum.
Installation
In Debian-based distributions you can install it directly from the repos with the following command:
sudo apt-get install golang
This command will install the compiler and create a folder called go in ~($HOME)
. To verify that everything has been installed correctly, you must create a simple program, compile it, and run it.
cd ~/go/src
mkdir helloworldapp && cd helloworldapp
While in this directory, you must create a file with vim, nano, or any other editor with the following content:
package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
fmt.Printf("hello, world\n")
}
And finally, compile and run it.
go build
./helloworldapp
The output of this program will be as follows:
hello, world
Configuration
As you may have noticed, the directory ~/go/src
is the default directory where language program files (workspace) should be created. To change this directory, you must configure the GOPATH
environment variable by adding the following line of code in the startup file of the shell you use.
export GOPATH=$HOME/go
Bash
You must edit the ~/.bash_profile
file and then run the following command.
source ~/.bash_profile
Zsh
You must edit the ~/.zshrc
file and then run the following command.
source ~/.zshrc
See you soon!