How does goenv handle $GOPATH? about goenv

[athrunsun]

@syndbg Thank you for your instructions! I'll try your recommendations!

[kevbo]

As a newcomer to Go, I fell into the exact situation you outlined above (fresh goenv install, fresh install of 1.7.4, try to install something with go get and find out my $GOPATH isn't set). So where should I point GOPATH?

[josegonzalez]

@kevbo you can basically do the same thing:

• Install your golang versions with goenv
• Set $GOPATH to the default of ~/go.
• Always create repos within your ~/go path in the normal golang directory structure.
• Create a .go-version in your repo to specify the golang version to use.
• Use govendor to install deps to a vendor directory within your repository.
  • Add the following to your repo's gitignore:

    vendor/*
    !vendor/vendor.json
    

  • New versions of golang will pick this up as of 1.6.0. 1.5.0 will need export GO15VENDOREXPERIMENT=1. Older versions will need some love...

[syndbg]

@athrunsun goenv combined with go-build (by default it's so) unsets GOPATH and GOHOME (ref: https://github.com/syndbg/goenv/blob/master/plugins/go-build/bin/go-build#L964) during install or uninstall (e.g goenv install 1.7.4, goenv uninstall 1.6).

After that it does nothing else. So for example if you do:

1. Fresh goenv install
2. goenv install 1.7.4
3. goenv global 1.7.4
4. go get github.com/petar/GoLLRB/llrb - you'll definitely need to have set $GOPATH beforehand.

tl;dr You must set $GOPATH by yourself.

[athrunsun]

Thanks for your reply, @syndbg !

Here is another question. From my understanding (please correct me if I understand anything wrong):

• python: we cannot install multiple versions of a package using pip, different projects share the same set of packages unless using virtualenv or pyenv.
• ruby: we can have multiple versions of a gem, different projects share the same set of gems unless using rvm or rbenv.
• nodejs: we can install multiple versions of a package using npm, but usually we will have project specific dependencies in a sub folder node_modules.

Whose behavior is the closest to golang?

[syndbg]

By default Go falls into

python: we cannot install multiple versions of a package using pip, different projects share the same set of packages unless using virtualenv or pyenv.

But I highly recommend using https://github.com/kardianos/govendor or https://github.com/tools/godep to get the best (imo) dependency management behavior that is:

nodejs: we can install multiple versions of a package using npm, but usually we will have project specific dependencies in a sub folder node_modules.

[syndbg]

@kevbo $HOME/gocode is my preference. Note that in Golang 1.8 there's a default $GOPATH. https://beta.golang.org/doc/go1.8#gopath

[kevbo]

@syndbg Thanks for answering that remedial question. Now I have another, more focused on goenv:

If most Golang projects are checked out/installed to GOPATH, how do you leverage goenv to pin a version of Golang to a specific project?

Apologies if that doesn't make sense or if I'm asking the wrong question. I might be looking for too much parity between Golang and Python, which I'm more familiar with. In Python, I use pyenv to keep multiple versions around. Then I'm able to pin a specific Python version to a project by dropping a .python-version file into the repo root. Finally, I'd create a virtualenv inside that directory for near-complete isolation for everything else.