Installing Golang

Hi there, welcome back, hope you read the introduction blog and are ready to install Go.

Installing Go is trivial, you can download the binaries for your platform from the Go’s download page and install it.

In this blog, we will install Go v1.11 and go through the steps of installation on macOS and Ubuntu operating systems.

Install Go v1.11.2 on Mac 10

Step 1: Download the package file from https://golang.org/doc/install?download=go1.11.2.darwin-amd64.pkg

Step 2: Open the package file and follow the prompts and that’s it – Go will be installed

screen-shot-2018-12-02-at-11-25-01-am

Screen Shot 2018-12-02 at 11.25.35 AM

Step 3: Check that the package will be installed in /usr/local/go folder and the PATH environment variable will be updated with /usr/local/go/bin

Step 4: Open the terminal and run go version command, you should see the below output, which confirms the go installation and prints the installed version as well

chetan:~ chetan$ go version
go version go1.11 darwin/amd64

Install Go v1.11.2 on Ubuntu 16.04

Step1: Make sure you update your packages, security patches and fixes by running these commands on Ubuntu:

ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get update
ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get -y upgrade

Step 2: Begin downloading the latest Go package from the downloads page using our very own curl command:

ubuntu:~$
curl -O https://storage.googleapis.com/golang/go1.11.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Step 3: Unzip the gzip file using the tar command, you will get the ‘go‘ folder after unzipping the contents. Now move the ‘go‘ folder to /usr/local/ (like in macOS installation)

ubuntu:~$ tar -xvf go1.11.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz
ubuntu:~$ sudo mv go /usr/local

Step 4: Use /usr/local/go/bin path to update your bash profile with PATH environment variable like the macOS installer did for us. You can also create a folder, say go-work under your home directory (in my case /home/ubuntu), this is where all our go related source code will go in. Don’t worry too much about GOPATH for now, we understand more about it in the next blog

ubuntu:~$ echo $HOME
/home/ubuntu
ubuntu:~$ mkdir go-work

ubuntu:~$ vi ~/.bashrc
export GOPATH=$HOME/go-work
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin:$GOPATH/bin

Step 5: Now reload your ~/.bashrc file (use appropriate profile file based on the shell you use, for instance use ~/.zshrc if you’re using zsh) and type go version on your terminal. And you’re done!

ubuntu:~$ source ~/.bashrc

ubuntu:~$ go version
go version go1.11.2 linux/amd64

So now we have Go v1.11 installed on macOS and Ubuntu. Hurray! 🙂

But we haven’t written any code yet and what about the Editor? Let’s look at them in our next blog.

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