Installing Go CLI

This tutorial talks about how to install Go compiler in your machine to start learning coding in Golang.

Set up Go in your System

Installing Go is quite straight forward. Just navigate to this page and it will guide you through the installation for specific operating system. On this page, click on the Download button as shown in the below image.

This takes us to respective version download for different operating system. Depending on your OS, you can choose one of the ways to download the binaries. It also has default windows installers which you can find with extension .msi and similarly for MacOS, it has .pkg files which are easily extracted to install it. If you need to install any other version, you can also do so by choosing earlier versions.

For Ubuntu or UNIX based systems we can install them by following below commands.

sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.12.6.linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar -xzf go*.tar.gz
sudo cp -r go /usr/local/

Once Go is installed, you can verify the installation by typing go version on your terminal or command prompt. This should show the installed version of Go binaries.

go version
go version go1.20.2 darwin/arm64

Go Command line tool

While we are at it, let’s play with the command line tool to get little bit of idea about all the options. I will mention only some of the most common options, but you can always get information about specific go command using go help and it will list all commands available with Go command line tool. This help is context aware, so if we need more information on go run command, we can type go help run. This will show a detailed description of this command.

Let’s learn about few of the Go commands. While running them, make sure to prefix them with go.