Golang

Golang Development Environment Setup

Setting up a Golang environment is easy and can be done in a matter of minutes. Depending on your operating system, follow the instructions below:

MacOS (using Homebrew)

1. Install Homebrew (if you haven’t already…Just go here for instructions

2. Install Go

   With Homebrew installed, you can now install Go:

   brew install go

3. Verify Installation

   To ensure Go is installed correctly:

   go version

   This should display the version of Go that you installed.

4. Setup Go Workspace

   While newer versions of Go do not strictly require you to have a GOPATH, it’s still a good practice to have one. You can set it up as:

   echo 'export GOPATH=$HOME/go' >> ~/.zshrc
   echo 'export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin' >> ~/.zshrc
   source ~/.zshrc

   Note: If you’re using bash instead of zsh, replace .zshrc with .bash_profile.

Windows (using Scoop)

1. Install Scoop (if you haven’t already)

   Open a PowerShell window and run:

   Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -scope CurrentUser
   iwr -useb get.scoop.sh | iex

2. Add the “extras” bucket (if you haven’t already)

   The extras bucket contains the Go app manifest and other useful software:

   scoop bucket add extras

3. Install Go

   Now you can install Go using Scoop:

   scoop install go

4. Verify Installation

   To ensure Go is installed correctly:

   go version

   This should display the version of Go that you installed.

5. Setup Go Workspace

   Although Go modules have made GOPATH less necessary, you might still want to set it:

   $env:GOPATH = "$HOME\go"
   [System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable('GOPATH', $env:GOPATH, [System.EnvironmentVariableTarget]::User)
   [System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable('PATH', $env:PATH + ";$env:GOPATH\bin", [System.EnvironmentVariableTarget]::User)

Configuring Go

When setting up your Go environment, there are various environment variables you can set to influence the behavior of Go tools. Below is a table describing the primary environment variables and their intended use:

Name	Value	Function
CGO_ENABLED	0	Disables the cgo command to reduce possible attack vectors (e.g. CVE-2020-28366 and CVE-2020-28367) which may be exploited by external modules.
GO_PRIVATE	(your value i.e. yourrepo.internal.com/*)	Comma-separated list of glob patterns (in the syntax of Go’s path.Match) of module path prefixes that should always be fetched directly from their origin and never through a proxy.
GOPROXY	(your value: i.e. Your internal nexus https://nexus.internal/read-go)	A comma-separated list of proxy URLs checked in sequence. This is used to download modules and verify their checksums.
GOSUMDB	(your value: i.e. sum.golang.org https://nexus.internal/raw-read-go-sum)	Indicates which checksum database to use. This can be set to off to disable the database check entirely.
GOVCS	(your value: i.e. *:off)	Configures which version control systems are allowed for which module path patterns.
no_proxy	(your value: i.e: .foo.bar.com,.foo.internal)	Comma-separated list of domain names or IP addresses that shouldn’t use a proxy. Useful for local development or private repositories.