Overview

• install Go from go.dev
• configure your terminal $PATH
• configure $GOPATH

Installing Go Tools

To install Go, I downloaded it from go.dev.

My setup is an ARM Mac laptop and my terminal is zsh

After installing, I ran into an issue running go version because it couldn’t find the installation path.

Go gets installed at ~/usr/local/go/bin but my ~/.zshrc file didn’t have the path, so it was looking for it in the wrong directory. The solution was to append my zsh path variable with the correct route.

However, the book instructed me to add the path to the .profile with these commands after opening the gzipped files with tar:

tar -C /usr/local -xzf {your go file here}
echo 'export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin' >> $HOME/.profile
source $HOME/.profile

I found out that .profile is specifically for bash, and I’m using zsh. So I ended up just manually adding this to my .zshrc file

export PATH="/usr/local/go/bin/":$PATH

Now, I am able to successfully run go version and all other commands

The Go Workspace

When you run go install commands, Go looks for a $GOPATH to run find those binaries to run.

We want to set our $GOPATH to $HOME/go. Then our directory will end up looking something like this:

$HOME/go/
├── bin/
├── pkg/
└── src/
    ├── github.com/
    │   └── spf13/
    │       └── cobra/
    └── myproject/
        └── main.go

Again, we need to update our .zshrc file to set up that $GOPATH variable, and append it to our terminal’s $PATH variable:

export GOPATH=$HOME/go
export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin