[gophersource] Building Go from Source

Technical Discussion
12

Building Go from source on Linux (Ubuntu 18.04)

This is the way I’ve built/set up Go from source on a brand new system (that didn’t have Go installed previously) following the official docs.

  1. Create an empty $HOME/go directory

  2. Download and extract the go1.4 source distribution to $HOME, and rename the directory you just unpacked to go1.4.

  3. To build the bootstrap toolchain run the following:

$ cd $HOME/go1.4
$ ./make.bash

(setting CGO_ENABLED=0 was not necessary for me)

  1. Fetch the Go repository and install the desired version:
$ cd /usr/local/
$ git clone https://go.googlesource.com/go

To install and change between versions, checkout the stable version’s branch e.g git checkout go1.10.3 or stay in master for the development branch, and run:

$ cd /usr/local/go/src/
$ ./all.bash

It will take some time to build and run all the tests, once this is done add the following to your ~/.profile, ~/.bash_profile or whichever file you use to be executed when you start a shell.

export GOROOT=/usr/local/go
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin
export PATH=$PATH:/home/[YOUR USER]/go/bin

apply the changes:

$ source ~/.profile
  1. Verify the version installed
$ go version
go version devel +f17220c208 Tue Jul 17 05:41:06 2018 +0000 linux/amd64

VGO / Go Modules

If you have the master branch installed these will be available by default since CL 123580. For more information on usage run go help modules on your CLI :grin: