golang: installing packages in a local directory

Question

What is the best practice to install packages (those with go get...) in a local directory?

Example: I'd like to try out the Revel web framework, but I don't want to clutter my go installation at /usr/local/go.

Normally I'd say sudo go get github.com/robfig/revel as written on the home page, but that would install it beneath /usr/local/go/src/pkg/....

Is there an easy way to say (for example) go get --local ... and have the package in the current (sub) directory?

Answer 1

You can export the env variable GOPATH. For me it is ~/local/lib/go. This folder has the subfolders bin, pkg and src, so it's just like /usr/local/go. The go-tool will then automatically download , build and install packages into this directory.

Answer 2

To expand on keks answer, you can update your .bashrc to look like this

export GOROOT=/usr/local/go
export GOPATH=~/workspace/me/go
export PATH=$PATH:$GOROOT/bin:$GOPATH/bin

Now all packages installed with go get are separate from the go distribution.

Answer 3

You might want to consider using Go Version Manager (gvm).

Apart from switching between Go versions easily, it also lets you switch between pkgsets ("workspaces").

First you create a set

gvm pkgset create myproject

and then you use it

gvm pkgset use myproject

Works like a charm.

Answer 4

In modern module enabled go (introduced in go 1.11), you can use the gobin program with a GOBIN env var specifying the destination of the binary:

GOBIN=./local gobin github.com/robfig/revel

Installation of gobin is done like so:

GO111MODULE=off go get -u github.com/myitcv/gobin