Install go without going insane or anything.

Well, if you’re tired of installing go manually, the installers polluting your PATH or GOROOT is always tripping. Then this is for ya.

To, start of we’ll be installing GO directly from the repo.

If you’re using ubuntu or any debian based distro, do.

sudo apt install golang -y

Now, GOLANG and GOROOT is already set by the binary, but the thing is, by default GOROOT will point to the go binary iteself, which will cause the error;

go: cannot find GOROOT directory: /usr/bin/go

or,

go: cannot find GOROOT directory: /usr/local/go

Now, to fix this we gotta point the GOROOT to the directory where all the other librariers, objects accociated with the go binary are present.

And, you’ll find that in,

/usr/lib/go

So, to sum it up; Add this inside your .bashrc if you’re using bash or .zshrc if your shell is zsh and you’re good to go.

export GOROOT=/usr/lib/go
export GOPATH=$HOME/go
export PATH=$PATH:$GOROOT/bin:$GOPATH/bin

If you’ve GOPATH set then just ignore that line or you can add whatever the name prefer.

After that do,

source ~/.bashrc

or,

source ~/.zshrc

Then restart your shell(Important) by opening a new terminal.

Type in,

go version

You should see something like this,

go version go1.17.5 linux/amd64

Now, to uninstall go ,

take backup of all your scripts and projects first.

Then do,

sudo rm -rf $GOROOT
sudo rm -rf $GOPATH
sudo apt purge golang

Finally comment out all the schemas in .bashrc or in .zshrc

again do, source ~/.bashrc or source ~/.zshrc based on your shell and you’re clean.

I hope this helps. 🙂

Install go without going insane or anything.