Installing and Setting Up Go on Linux

To install Go, we need to download the package for our server's operating system and CPU architecture from the Go downloads page. The server we've been given is running 64-bit Linux, so we'll need the linux-amd64 version.

After the package is downloaded, it should be extracted and moved to /usr/local. Here's one way we can achieve this for version 1.11.2:

~ $ cd /tmp
/tmp $ wget https://dl.google.com/go/go1.11.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz
/tmp $ sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.11.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz

We'll also want to install git:

~ $ sudo yum install -y git

When developing with Go, the source code needs to be placed in the $GOPATH, and that directory tree needs to be manually set up. We need to create the directories at ~/go, ~/go/bin, and ~/go/src. Once these directories are set up, then we'll also need to set up the $GOPATH environment variable.

~ $ mkdir -p ~/go/{src,bin}
~ $ echo 'export GOPATH=$HOME/go' >> ~/.bashrc

The Go package we downloaded comes with its own binaries, but we won't have access to them until they are placed within our $PATH. We need to append the /usr/local/go/bin and $GOPATH/bin directories to our $PATH in the .bashrc file.

/tmp $ cd ~
~ $ echo 'export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin:$GOPATH/bin' >> ~/.bashrc
~ $ source .bashrc
~ $ go run hello.go
Thank you for setting up this server!
~ $