Appendix. Installing and setting up Go
Before you can write your first line of Go code, you’ll need to set up the environment. Let’s start off with installing Go. The latest version of Go as of this writing is Go 1.6. To install Go, you can either download or use the official binary distributions, or you can install Go from source.
Official binary distributions are available for FreeBSD (release 8 and above), Linux (2.6.23 and above), Mac OS X (Snow Leopard and above), and Windows (XP and above). Both 32-bt (386) and 64-bit (amd64) x86 processor architectures are supported. For FreeBSD and Linux, ARM processor architecture is also supported.
To install Go, download the distribution package from https://golang.org/dl/
Choose the file appropriate for your platform. Once you have the distribution package, install Go according to your platform of choice. Note that although Go doesn’t have a dependency on any source code versioning system, some Go tools like go get need it, so to make your life a bit easier you should download and install them as you’re installing Go.
You can get the following source code versioning systems here:
- Mercurial—http://mercurial.selenic.com
- Subversion—http://subversion.apache.org
- Git—http://git-scm.com
- Bazaar—http://bazaar.canonical.com
To install on Linux or FreeBSD, you’d likely download go<VERSION>.<OS>-<ARCHITECTURE>.tar.gz. The latest Go for Linux on a 64-bit architecture is go1.3.3.linux-amd64.tar.gz.