Introduction
I just recently started learning the GO programming language. While I have realized that keeping notes of what I am learning along the way is crucial to the learning process, I also decided to as well share some of my notes in the form of short articles revolving around everything I have learnt.
I almost skipped knowing what the $GOPATH
is about all together as it wasn't discussed properly in the first resource I tried learning GO with. But from what I have gathered, I realize it is important to understand what the $GOPATH
is and understand how it works.
What is $GOPATH?
I'll be answering this in a bullet point format to make it easier to digest. Here are some of the points I gathered:
The
$GOPATH
is an environment variable. It shows a location to a physical directory on a machine which has GO set up.The
$GOPATH
directory is automatically created under theusers
folder when the Visual Studio Code GO extension is installed so we do not need to create it.By default, GO assumes that the folder
$GOPATH
shows is in yourusers
folder. So we do not need to set it.To know what your
$GOPATH
is, use the command below in your terminal:
$ go env GOPATH
It is usually in the form Users/{user}/go
The directory
$GOPATH
points to is also referred to as a Workspace. It also shows GO tools where it can find GO source code files and other related stuffs like compiled packages, executable binaries and so on. By convention, every GO project uses this folder.Inside this directory are three folders:
bin
,pkg
, andsrc
. Thesrc
folder contains GO source-code files and this is where we keep our GO projects.When we download a GO project, it is stored under the
$GOPATH
.An executable GO program needs its own directory which we create under the
$GOPATH/src
folder. For example:
$GOPATH/src/helloworld/main.go
- If you have a GitHub account, it is better to put your project in a
github.com
folder under thesrc
directory i.e.
$GOPATH/src/github.com/{your-username}/helloworld/main.go
- Since we will be creating our projects under the
$GOPATH/src
folder, to open up the folder in VS Code using the terminal, if you're on MAC or have git bash installed on Windows, type:
$ code ~/go/src
Conclusion
Looking back, I realize how vital understanding what the $GOPATH
is as a GO developer and how important its concept is in developing GO programs and packages. It is in fact a convention in the GO community and I would definitely urge anyone new to the language to endeavour to understand what it is.
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