Hello World in Go

The Go programming language is an open source project to make programmers more productive. In the following blog post I assume you already have the Go environment setup. To get started with Go is just a matter of adding some code. The example below covers a basic “Hello World”.

Go Installation

1. Confirm Go is installed

go version

If it is not installed check out a previous post to install Go in Linux

Development setup

With go already installed, the setup requires a couple more steps

• Create a directory for your code
• Initialise the location where the module can be found

1. Make the go home directory

   mkdir -p ~/hello && cd hello
   

2. Initialise the hello directory

go mod init example.com/hello

3. The directory should now look like this:

.
└── go.mod

Hello World

In the hello world example we will perform three things

• Declare a package name
• Import the “fmt” package to use the fmt.Println function
• Declare a main func - which is the entry point for our go application

1. Create a hello.go program using an editor e.g.

   vi hello.go
   

2. Add the following code to hello.go

   package main
   import "fmt"
   func main() {
     fmt.Println("hello, world\n")
   }
   

3. The directory should now look like this:

.
├── go.mod
└── hello.go

Build go

The last thing to do is build our application and run it.

1. Build the hello.go application

   go build
   

2. The directory should now look like this:

.
├── go.mod
├── hello
└── hello.go

3. Run the code hello application

   ./hello
   

The application output should be as per below:

hello, world