Install Go

Dec 23, 2020 chromeos go linux

The Go programming language is an open source project to make programmers more productive.
Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

Version

Select a stable version of Go by visitng golang.org
Create an environment variable to store the version e.g.

1GOLANG_VERSION="1.15"

Install

Download the Linux (i.e. x86-64) Go package

1curl -Lo /tmp/go${GOLANG_VERSION}.linux-amd64.tar.gz https://golang.org/dl/go${GOLANG_VERSION}.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Install the package into /usr/local

1sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf /tmp/go${GOLANG_VERSION}.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Edit .bashrc setting and add the installation directory to the path
```
1vi ~/.bashrc
```

Insert the following configuration at the bottom of the .bashrc file

1# set PATH so it includes go installation if it exists
2if [ -d "/usr/local/go/bin" ] ; then
3  # export GOPATH=$HOME/go
4  PATH="/usr/local/go/bin:$PATH"
5fi

Activate the updated settings
```
1source ~/.bashrc
```
Check the installation matches the installation version
```
1go version
```

The above command will output the version of Go installed e.g.

1go version go1.15 linux/amd64