Setting up environment variables

In order for most of the Go toolchain to work, the GOPATH environment variable must be set. The GOPATH specifies what directory you treat as your workspace. The GOPATH environment variable must be set before you can build packages. For more help and information, call the go help command in the Terminal by running this command:

go help gopath

We need to tell Go to treat our home directory as the workspace. This is done by setting the GOPATH environment variable. You can set GOPATH in three ways:

• The first way is to set it manually each time you run the go command. Consider this example:

      GOPATH=$HOME go build hello

• You can also set the GOPATH variable so that it stays set until you close your Terminal and the environment variable is lost:

      export GOPATH=$HOME

• The third option is to set the GOPATH environment variable permanently as follows:

1. 1. Add it to your shell startup script, .bashrc. This will set the variable every time you start the Terminal.
   2. Run this to ensure that GOPATH is set whenever you open future Terminal/shell sessions:

              echo "export GOPATH=$HOME" >> $HOME/.bashrc

1. 1. Restart your Terminal for the changes to take effect. If you are using Zsh or an alternative shell, you will need to update the respective RC file.