Getting Started With Go

Installation

Go to Golang.org download page and download go<version>.darwin-amd64.pkg for your Mac OS. It should include an installer and provide instruction on how to install Golang step by step.

When you are done, make sure you run go in your terminal. If Go has been successfully installed on your machine, you should expect to see the following text.

MacBook: ~Calvin$ go
Go is a tool for managing Go source coode.

Usage:

    go command [arguments]

Project Structure

Workspace

Go has this concept of a workspace. It's basically a folder where you'd put all your source code for all your Go programs. I usually put my workspace in my ~ directory. I called my workspace Gopher or Workspace, but feel free to name it whatever you like.

Calvin/
    Applications/
    Desktop/
    Documents/
    etc...
    Gopher/
        bin/
        pkg/
        src/

Go Path

In order for Go to recognize your workspace directory, you must go to your home directory and define your environmental variables in your .bash_profile.

For example:

cd ~
code .bash_profile

And then insert the following into your bash profile:

# Go paths
export GO=/user/local/go
export GOPATH=/Users/Calvin/Gopher
export PATH=$PATH:$GO/bin:$GOPATH/bin

Now, whenever you start a new project, put it into $GOPATH/src folder. For example: Gopher/ bin/ pkg/ src/ go-academy/ first_program/ hello_world.go main.go bye_world.go

Go Module

Skip this section for now and re-visit when you start reading websocket server section.

If you are using Go 1.11+, you have the option of using go module which allows you to put your source code anywhere on your computer. Although the next 3 sections are written with go dep as the dependency manager, you are free to use go module.

To activate go module, insert the following environmental variable in your .bash_profile.

export GO111MODULE=on

Navigate to your Desktop and create a new folder helloworld.

cd ~/Desktop
mkdir helloworld
cd helloworld/

Initialize a go module

go mod init github.com/calvinfeng/helloworld

It is indicating to Go that my project will be publicly available on github.com/calvinfeng, but if you don't intend to share your code, the path is optional. You can initialize it with whatever name you like. Suppose another person who would like to use my packages from my helloworld repository, he/she simply needs to perform a import in his/her source code.

package main

import "github.com/calvinfeng/helloworld/dog

func main() {
    dog.SaysHello()
}