Writing Go code is a fun and enjoyable experience where compile-time errors—rather than being a pain—actually guide you to write robust, high-quality code. However, every now and again, you will encounter environmental issues that start to get in the way and break your flow. While you can usually resolve these issues after some searching and a little tweaking, setting up your development environment correctly goes a long way in reducing problems, allowing you to focus on building useful applications.
In this chapter, we are going to install Go from scratch on a new machine and discuss some of the environmental options we have and the impact they might have in the future. We will also consider how collaboration might influence some of our decisions, as well as what impact open sourcing our packages might have.
Specifically, we are going to:
Get the Go source code and build it natively on your development machine
Learn what the
GOPATHenvironment variable is for, and discuss a sensible approach to its useLearn about the Go tools and how to use them to keep the quality of our code high
Learn how to use a tool to automatically manage our imports
Think about "on save" operations for our
.gofiles, and how we can integrate the Go tools as part of our daily development