Golang Tips

The Only Correct Way To Configure GoLang Development Environment for VSCode On MacOS

GOPATH And GOROOT Correct Set Up In Mac And In VSCode

Many developers on iOS have encountered the problems of installing Golang and configure the environment variables, such as

build esc: cannot load xxx : malformed module path “xxx”: missing dot in first path element

warning: GOPATH set to GOROOT (/Users/xxx/go/) has no effect

In fact, they are all caused by the misconfiguration of the two key parameters of GOPATH and GOROOT.

Precondition: installing GoLang on Mac OS with brew, rather than use pkg distribution

brew install go

The correct values for GOPATH and GOROOT

edit ~/.bash_profile by adding the following lines :

source ~/.bash_profile

Here is the reason behind:

GOPATH is the place where we get, build and install packages outside the standard Go tree (so it’s NOT where the executables are!), so it is customizable and thus you can set GOPATH wherever you want.

However, GOROOT is the place where the Go binary distributions assume they will be installed (so in Linux distributions, it’s normally in /usr/local/go , but for MacOS, the Go and the tools are installed in /usr/local/Cellar/go/1.13/x.xx.xx by default as well as a soft link to /usr/local/opt/go/libexec will be created at the same time), so on Linux normally we don’t have to set this variable, but on MacOS, we have to change it as brew installs Go tools to a different path.

Config vscode settings

if you also use vscode as your Golang editor and want to debug in a friendly GUI pattern, install the go extension as the following:

Now it’s the key part, in vscode, open the settings.json in the directory: ~/Library/Application…