Installing Go

See Installing Go on golang.org for details on installing Go. This page has instructions for installing from a pre-compiled tarball on Linux, OSX, and FreeBSD. It also has links to an OSX package installer, an MSI installer for Windows, and a few other options.

For Linux systems, your package manager may have a Golang 1.18 or newer package. On Ubuntu, you may find the the longsleep/golang-backports PPA useful:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:longsleep/golang-backports
sudo apt update
sudo apt install golang-1.18

For Fedora and Red Hat, check out https://go-repo.io/ for golang packages.

Operating Systems

Go should work identically on Linux, OSX, and Windows systems.

The exercises repository uses symlinks in the answer directories to avoid having to copy some files around. However, you don't need to run or edit any code in the answer directories (they're for the instructor).

Getting Set Up for the Class

There are a couple repos you should check out:

• git clone https://github.com/autarch/intro-to-go-class
• git clone https://github.com/autarch/intro-to-go-class-exercises

You need to make sure the GOROOT env var is set to the root directory of your go installation. On Ubuntu with the golang-1.18-go package fom the longsleep PPA this will be /usr/lib/go.

Editor Integration

There are Go integrations for every popular editor.

VS Code

Install the Go extension.

GoLand

This is JetBrains's Go IDE. It offers a free 30-day trial period.

Emacs

If you're using Emacs as your editor, I highly recommend installing go-mode for syntax highlighting. You can install this using ELPA. Add the http://melpa.milkbox.net/packages package repo in order to get the latest go-mode package.

I also suggest binding a key to execute gofmt on the current buffer. Here's a snippet that binds M-t:

(add-hook 'go-mode-hook
          (lambda ()
            (local-set-key "\M-t" `gofmt)))

You can also bind this to goimports. Install this with go get golang.org/x/tools/cmd/goimports. This wraps gofmt and makes sure that the list of package imports for the file is correct.

Vim and Neovim

Here are some useful Vim tools for Go:

• https://github.com/fatih/vim-go - syntax highlighting, auto gofmt on save, and more.
• https://github.com/dense-analysis/ale - syntax checking as you type and LSP integration.
• See https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/IDEsAndTextEditorPlugins for more.

Language Server

If your editor support the Language Server Protocol (LSP), you should install the gopls tool as a language server:

go get golang.org/x/tools/gopls@latest

See the gopls docs for details on editor integration.

General Editor Recommendations

Setting up your editor to integrate with go fmt and go vet can make your Go coding experience much better. You can have it run these checks on the currently loaded file and/or run these checks every time you save your code.

You may also want to be able to run the golangci-lint linter easily, though I don't recommend this as a default action for every save. It will often complain about issues that you will not want to fix immediately, especially when you write code for this class's exercises.

Reading the Slides on Your System

Being able to browse the slides while doing the exercises will be very helpful, so I recommend getting this set up in advance.

First, you'll need to clone this repo:

git clone https://github.com/autarch/intro-to-go-class

Next you'll need the present tool. Run this command to install it:

go install golang.org/x/tools/cmd/present@latest

The present binary will be installed as $HOME/go/bin/present.

You can run present from the root of this repo, which contains the intro-to-go.slide file. Open up the URL that present gives you and you'll see a link for intro-to-go.slide. Click on that to open the slides.