I’m testing microservices build with Go [https://golang.org/] lately. So I need to set up a working Go environment.

On a mac, it’s as easy as `brew install go`, but on CentOS `yum install go` will give you an outdated 1.4 version of go.

There are a few tricks to using Go, but the basics are to set two environment variables: GOROOT and GOPATH

GOROOT is strictly not necessary (unless you’re dealing with multiple versions of go, which is officially not recommended.)

GOPATH is kinda like setting your PATH or JAVA_HOME, but GOPATH is additionally tricky because it determines where your dependencies are a installed, so it’s really more a bit like setting M2_HOME (if you use maven.)

Go `go get` is aware of git & mercurial repositories, it can install packages from github for you, but it is only semi-aware — in that it doesn’t understand versions. So you either need to fork each dependency’s repo at the version you need (and merge when you need updates) or just freeze it. So each project needs it’s own GOPATH (and a branch with each depndency tree.)

Enter GVM. Kinda like RVM, NVM but for Go. Here are the steps I use to set it up:

# install go dependencies on CentOS 7.2
yum install curl-devel expat-devel gettext-devel openssl-devel zlib-devel gcc perl-ExtUtils

# throw in the dev kitchen sink while your at it
yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

#install GVM (https://github.com/moovweb/gvm)
bash < <(curl -s -S -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/moovweb/gvm/master/binscripts/gvm-installer)
source ~/.gvm/scripts/gvm

# install go 1.4 (to be able to build later versions)
gvm install go1.4
gvm use 1.4

# now I can install go 1.6
gvm install go1.6
gvm use 1.6

# create a packageset for my project
gvm pkgset create mygoproject
gvm pkgset use mygoproject

# finally, I can get some work done and build my Go project
git clone git@github.com:fijiaaron/mygoproject.git
cd mygoproject
go install