This document demonstrates the development of a simple Go package and introduces the go tool, the standard way to fetch, build, and install Go packages and commands.
The go tool requires you to organize your code in a specific
way. Please read this document carefully.
It explains the simplest way to get up and running with your Go installation.
A similar explanation is available as a screencast.
Note that this differs from other programming environments in which every project has a separate workspace and workspaces are closely tied to version control repositories.
A workspace is a directory hierarchy with three directories at its root:
src contains Go source files,
pkg contains package objects, and
bin contains executable commands.
The go tool builds source packages and installs the resulting
binaries to the pkg and bin directories.
The src subdirectory typically contains multiple version control
repositories (such as for Git or Mercurial) that track the development of one
or more source packages.
To give you an idea of how a workspace looks in practice, here's an example:
bin/
hello # command executable
outyet # command executable
pkg/
linux_amd64/
github.com/golang/example/
stringutil.a # package object
src/
github.com/golang/example/
.git/ # Git repository metadata
hello/
hello.go # command source
outyet/
main.go # command source
main_test.go # test source
stringutil/
reverse.go # package source
reverse_test.go # test source
golang.org/x/image/
.git/ # Git repository metadata
bmp/
reader.go # package source
writer.go # package source
... (many more repositories and packages omitted) ...
The tree above shows a workspace containing two repositories
(example and image).
The example repository contains two commands (hello
and outyet) and one library (stringutil).
The image repository contains the bmp package
and several others.
A typical workspace contains many source repositories containing many packages and commands. Most Go programmers keep all their Go source code and dependencies in a single workspace.
Commands and libraries are built from different kinds of source packages. We will discuss the distinction later.
GOPATH environment variable
The GOPATH environment variable specifies the location of your
workspace. It is likely the only environment variable you'll need to set
when developing Go code.
To get started, create a workspace directory and set GOPATH
accordingly. Your workspace can be located wherever you like, but we'll use
$HOME/work in this document. Note that this must not be the
same path as your Go installation.
(Another common setup is to set GOPATH=$HOME.)
$ mkdir $HOME/work $ export GOPATH=$HOME/work
For convenience, add the workspace's bin subdirectory
to your PATH:
$ export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin
To learn more about setting up the GOPATH environment variable,
please see
go help gopath
An import path is a string that uniquely identifies a package. A package's import path corresponds to its location inside a workspace or in a remote repository (explained below).
The packages from the standard library are given short import paths such as
"fmt" and "net/http".
For your own packages, you must choose a base path that is unlikely to
collide with future additions to the standard library or other external
libraries.
If you keep your code in a source repository somewhere, then you should use the
root of that source repository as your base path.
For instance, if you have a GitHub account at
github.com/user, that should be your base path.
Note that you don't need to publish your code to a remote repository before you can build it. It's just a good habit to organize your code as if you will publish it someday. In practice you can choose any arbitrary path name, as long as it is unique to the standard library and greater Go ecosystem.
We'll use github.com/user as our base path. Create a directory
inside your workspace in which to keep source code:
$ mkdir -p $GOPATH/src/github.com/user
To compile and run a simple program, first choose a package path (we'll use
github.com/user/hello) and create a corresponding package directory
inside your workspace:
$ mkdir $GOPATH/src/github.com/user/hello
Next, create a file named hello.go inside that directory,
containing the following Go code.
package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
fmt.Printf("Hello, world.\n")
}
Now you can build and install that program with the go tool:
$ go install github.com/user/hello
Note that you can run this command from anywhere on your system. The
go tool finds the source code by looking for the
github.com/user/hello package inside the workspace specified by
GOPATH.
You can also omit the package path if you run go install from the
package directory:
$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/user/hello $ go install
This command builds the hello command, producing an executable
binary. It then installs that binary to the workspace's bin
directory as hello (or, under Windows, hello.exe).
In our example, that will be $GOPATH/bin/hello, which is
$HOME/work/bin/hello.
The go tool will only print output when an error occurs, so if
these commands produce no output they have executed successfully.
You can now run the program by typing its full path at the command line:
$ $GOPATH/bin/hello Hello, world.
Or, as you have added $GOPATH/bin to your PATH,
just type the binary name:
$ hello Hello, world.
If you're using a source control system, now would be a good time to initialize a repository, add the files, and commit your first change. Again, this step is optional: you do not need to use source control to write Go code.
$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/user/hello $ git init Initialized empty Git repository in /home/user/work/src/github.com/user/hello/.git/ $ git add hello.go $ git commit -m "initial commit" [master (root-commit) 0b4507d] initial commit 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+) create mode 100644 hello.go
Pushing the code to a remote repository is left as an exercise for the reader.
Let's write a library and use it from the hello program.
Again, the first step is to choose a package path (we'll use
github.com/user/stringutil) and create the package directory:
$ mkdir $GOPATH/src/github.com/user/stringutil
Next, create a file named reverse.go in that directory with the
following contents.
// Package stringutil contains utility functions for working with strings.
package stringutil
// Reverse returns its argument string reversed rune-wise left to right.
func Reverse(s string) string {
r := []rune(s)
for i, j := 0, len(r)-1; i < len(r)/2; i, j = i+1, j-1 {
r[i], r[j] = r[j], r[i]
}
return string(r)
}
Now, test that the package compiles with go build:
$ go build github.com/user/stringutil
Or, if you are working in the package's source directory, just:
$ go build
This won't produce an output file. To do that, you must use go
install, which places the package object inside the pkg
directory of the workspace.
After confirming that the stringutil package builds,
modify your original hello.go (which is in
$GOPATH/src/github.com/user/hello) to use it:
package main
import (
"fmt"
"github.com/user/stringutil"
)
func main() {
fmt.Printf(stringutil.Reverse("!oG ,olleH"))
}
Whenever the go tool installs a package or binary, it also
installs whatever dependencies it has.
So when you install the hello program
$ go install github.com/user/hello
the stringutil package will be installed as well, automatically.
Running the new version of the program, you should see a new, reversed message:
$ hello Hello, Go!
After the steps above, your workspace should look like this:
bin/
hello # command executable
pkg/
linux_amd64/ # this will reflect your OS and architecture
github.com/user/
stringutil.a # package object
src/
github.com/user/
hello/
hello.go # command source
stringutil/
reverse.go # package source
Note that go install placed the stringutil.a object
in a directory inside pkg/linux_amd64 that mirrors its source
directory.
This is so that future invocations of the go tool can find the
package object and avoid recompiling the package unnecessarily.
The linux_amd64 part is there to aid in cross-compilation,
and will reflect the operating system and architecture of your system.
Go command executables are statically linked; the package objects need not be present to run Go programs.
The first statement in a Go source file must be
package name
where name is the package's default name for imports.
(All files in a package must use the same name.)
Go's convention is that the package name is the last element of the
import path: the package imported as "crypto/rot13"
should be named rot13.
Executable commands must always use package main.
There is no requirement that package names be unique across all packages linked into a single binary, only that the import paths (their full file names) be unique.
See Effective Go to learn more about Go's naming conventions.
Go has a lightweight test framework composed of the go test
command and the testing package.
You write a test by creating a file with a name ending in _test.go
that contains functions named TestXXX with signature
func (t *testing.T).
The test framework runs each such function;
if the function calls a failure function such as t.Error or
t.Fail, the test is considered to have failed.
Add a test to the stringutil package by creating the file
$GOPATH/src/github.com/user/stringutil/reverse_test.go containing
the following Go code.
package stringutil
import "testing"
func TestReverse(t *testing.T) {
cases := []struct {
in, want string
}{
{"Hello, world", "dlrow ,olleH"},
{"Hello, 世界", "界世 ,olleH"},
{"", ""},
}
for _, c := range cases {
got := Reverse(c.in)
if got != c.want {
t.Errorf("Reverse(%q) == %q, want %q", c.in, got, c.want)
}
}
}
Then run the test with go test:
$ go test github.com/user/stringutil ok github.com/user/stringutil 0.165s
As always, if you are running the go tool from the package
directory, you can omit the package path:
$ go test ok github.com/user/stringutil 0.165s
Run go help test and see the
testing package documentation for more detail.
An import path can describe how to obtain the package source code using a
revision control system such as Git or Mercurial. The go tool uses
this property to automatically fetch packages from remote repositories.
For instance, the examples described in this document are also kept in a
Git repository hosted at GitHub
github.com/golang/example.
If you include the repository URL in the package's import path,
go get will fetch, build, and install it automatically:
$ go get github.com/golang/example/hello $ $GOPATH/bin/hello Hello, Go examples!
If the specified package is not present in a workspace, go get
will place it inside the first workspace specified by GOPATH.
(If the package does already exist, go get skips the remote
fetch and behaves the same as go install.)
After issuing the above go get command, the workspace directory
tree should now look like this:
bin/
hello # command executable
pkg/
linux_amd64/
github.com/golang/example/
stringutil.a # package object
github.com/user/
stringutil.a # package object
src/
github.com/golang/example/
.git/ # Git repository metadata
hello/
hello.go # command source
stringutil/
reverse.go # package source
reverse_test.go # test source
github.com/user/
hello/
hello.go # command source
stringutil/
reverse.go # package source
reverse_test.go # test source
The hello command hosted at GitHub depends on the
stringutil package within the same repository. The imports in
hello.go file use the same import path convention, so the
go get command is able to locate and install the dependent
package, too.
import "github.com/golang/example/stringutil"
This convention is the easiest way to make your Go packages available for others to use. The Go Wiki and godoc.org provide lists of external Go projects.
For more information on using remote repositories with the go tool, see
go help importpath.
Subscribe to the golang-announce mailing list to be notified when a new stable version of Go is released.
See Effective Go for tips on writing clear, idiomatic Go code.
Take A Tour of Go to learn the language proper.
Visit the documentation page for a set of in-depth articles about the Go language and its libraries and tools.
For real-time help, ask the helpful gophers in #go-nuts on the
Freenode IRC server.
The official mailing list for discussion of the Go language is Go Nuts.
Report bugs using the Go issue tracker.