In order to work with Go packages, one will need to setup a GOPATH environment variable which contains the path to the directory one intents to use with Go.

After specifying the GOPATH variable, don’t forget to append $GOPATH/bin to PATH.

For my different go projects, I often specify a GOPATH directory within my project’s working directory. This way I can keep my GOPATH’s for different projects separated.

Imagine the project spaceship-api stored at /path/spaceship. I tend to setup a gopath directory at /path/spaceship/gopath, while I park the api repository in /path/spaceship/api. Before getting started, I basically do the following:

export GOPATH=/path/spacechip/gopath
export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin

Now I can access all binaries within the $GOPATH/bin directory, and perform go get commands without putting much thought into other projects that I may be screwing up.