I had a bit of a play around with Go today. Didn't get much further than a basic hello world but using the net/http component to serve it in the browser. This post really serves as me reminding myself what I did to set everything up and get going.

First up, installing go is easy because I'm on Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install golang

Then, as I'm used to PhpStorm, I went ahead and installed JetBrains's EAP Go IDE, Gogland which was minimal fuss.

Following the documentation and a helpful screencast I managed to figure out something that jarred me to start with. I fired up Gogland, and it kept complaining about GOPATH being missing. It's not immediately clear what this is, but it turns out that Go mandates a specific folder structure, for example if you chose your GOPATH to be in ~/go:

~/go
 - bin
   - project1
   - project2
 - pkg/linux_amd64/github.com/othervendor
   - libfoo.a
 - src/github.com
   - asgrim
     - project1 [...]
     - project2 [...]
   - othervendor
     - libfoo [...]

This was a bit frustrating at first, because I have have all other projects in ~/workspace/<project-name>. So, after throwing my toys out the pram and screaming at a wall, I got over it and understood the folder structure. A good thing to do once you've also done the screaming thing is to set up paths, by adding this into ~/.profile:

export GOPATH=$HOME/go
export PATH=$GOPATH/bin:$PATH

Once set up, I whizzed through the tutorial in the screencast above and got the "hello world" app running, along with the "string" library to reverse the string. I then went a little further and used the net/http library to serve up the string reversing tool as a web page, which was pretty easy to do.

Of course, not that it's much use to anyone, but the repo I set up is in https://github.com/asgrim/go-playground. Just a useful closer, it may help to visualise that folder structure:

~/go
 - bin
   - hello
 - pkg/linux_amd64/github.com/asgrim/go-playground
   - string.a
 - src/github.com
   - asgrim
     - go-playground
       - hello [...]
       - string [...]

Another useful resource I found, though I haven't worked my way through it all is Evert Pot's slides from his talk Go for PHP programmers.