Installing Go for first-time programmers on a Mac

9 min readMay 28, 2018

If you’re interested in learning the Go programming language, this guide will walk you through how to set up a brand new Mac step-by-step, with all the tools you’ll need to write and run Go programs.

In this guide will cover how to:

Download & Install Go; the programming language tools/binaries.
Download & Install a Code Editor; a tool to write Go code in.
Create Your Go Workspace; a place to store your code.
Write Your First Go Program; a simple “hello world” program.

Let’s begin!

1. Download & Install Go

Installing Go

Download Go for “Apple macOS” from: https://golang.org/dl/

Double-click on the downloaded file (e.g. go1.10.2.darwin-amd64.pkg) to run the installer:

Click “Continue”, click “Install”, enter your password and press Enter or Click “Install Software”. Go will now begin installing, and after a moment you should see a green tick:

Verifying Go is installed

You might be wondering how do you “use” Go? Welcome to the world of the Terminal (a.k.a. “command-line” or “shell”).

To open the Terminal on a Mac, open Spotlight search (use the Command-Tab [⌘-Tab] shortcut, or click the search icon [🔍] at the top-right of your screen), then search for “Terminal”.

If Terminal is highlighted (as above), press Enter — this should open a new Terminal window. Type go version to verify Go is installed correctly:

The go1.10.2 darwin/amd64 line has the same information in the filename of the file we downloaded when installing Go — this confirms we’ve got that version correctly installed.

Note: if you see an error like bash: go: command not found then something is broken with your Go installation. At this point, asking a friend, searching the web or asking for help (e.g. on Gophers Slack) is probably the best way to get helping fixing things — we have a very friendly community, please don’t be afraid to ask for help! :)

2. Download & Install a Code Editor

Overview of code editors for Go

There are a huge number of code editors and IDE’s that you can choose from to make writing Go code as easy and enjoyable as possible. A good editor will highlight issues with your code, make browsing code easier, will provide auto-completion and offer hints/additional context for the code you’re working on.

For writing Go, here is a list of popular options:

Visual Studio Code with the Go extension
Vim with the vim-go plugin
Atom with the go-plus plugin
Sublime Text with the GoSublime plugin
GoLand

Note that the first three are Free and Open Source — the last two are not.

This guide covers using Visual Studio Code (a.k.a. “VS Code”) because I’ve found it the easiest for beginner users to get up-and-running, it’s free and it’s Open Source.

Installing VS Code

Download for Mac from https://code.visualstudio.com/Download

Double-click to unzip the VSCode-darwin-stable.zip file, and drag the Visual Studio Code application into your Applications folder.

Once you’ve moved it to the Applications folder, launch VS Code by double-clicking the Visual Studio Code application (you can also launch using the Spotlight search feature we used earlier — searching for “vs” should find it).

A note about Telemetry in VS Code

One thing I always like to tell people when suggesting they install VS Code is that it collects telemetry data which Microsoft uses “to help understand how to improve the product. For example, it helps debug issues such as slow start-up times and prioritize features”. And while you might be ok with this, I think it’s important to show you how to disable Telemetry Reporting and Crash Reporting, in case you want to do that.

Both Telemetry Reporting and Crash Reporting can be switched off by toggling two simple settings:

"telemetry.enableTelemetry": false
"telemetry.enableCrashReporter": false

To do this, open VS Code, click on “Code” menu at the top of the screen, click Preferences -> Settings to open Settings (or use the Command-Comma [⌘ ,] shortcut). Now in the search bar, type “telemetry”:

To toggle the telemetry settings, click on the edit icon (✎) next to each setting and select false;

Note: when you change the Crash Reporter setting, you’ll be asked to restart VS Code — click “Restart” and the changes should be saved.

Your “User Settings” should now look like this:

Hooray for privacy!

Installing the Go extension

The final step to getting VS Code ready for your Go code is to install the “Go” extension. This enables VS Code to understand the Go language better..

To go to the “Extensions” view, either click the bottom-left icon on the left-hand-side of the editor, or click on the “View” menu at the top of your screen and select “Extensions” (or use the Shift-Command-X [↑⌘X] shortcut).

From the Extensions view, search for “go” and the first result should be the official vscode-go extension. Click the green “Install” button, and after a minute a “Reload” button should appear — click “Reload” and VS Code will restart. If you navigate to the Extensions view and don’t have anything in the search bar, you should now see the Go extension installed:

Congratulations — you’re editor is all set-up!

3. Create Your Go Workspace

Your code will need to live in a file somewhere. Most programming languages don’t care where this exists on your computer. Go has the concept of a “Workspace”; a directory where all of your Go code should live.

Since Go version 1.8, the Workspace defaults to a directory called “go” inside your home directory. You can override it by setting your GOPATH — for beginners I’d recommend sticking with the default.

If you’re wondering how to access your “home directory” in Finder, you can add it to the Favorites list on your Finder sidebar by going to Finder -> Preferences, Sidebar tab:

Toggle the checkbox next to the House icon with your username to add your Home directory to Favorites

You should now see this in the list of Favorites in the Finder sidebar, and you can drag it to the top of the list for easy access. If you browse to your home directory, you should now see the “go” workspace directory:

As you learn about the concept of the Workspace, you’ll also learn the basics of Packages in Go — neat!

Let’s use an example: https://github.com/ryan0x44/go-helloworld

This is a Go package called “go-helloworld”. You can download & install it by running this in your terminal: go get github.com/ryan0x44/go-helloworld

Running go get should automatically create your Workspace in the default location, and download the contents of that Github link to src/github.com/ryan0x44/go-helloworld in your home directory — which would look like this in Finder:

Your home directory is the same location a Terminal window opens into by default. So if you launch a new Terminal, and use the cd command to “change directory” and the ls command to “list files”, you can see the same directory structure as in Finder:

Note that you can “cd” one directory/level at a time, or multiple levels as per the last line of the screenshot.

You can now open this code up in Visual Studio Code. Click on the “File” menu, and click “Open…” (or use the Command-O [⌘O] shortcut) — then select the “src” directory inside your Go Workspace.

You should be able to use the arrows to expand the full hierarchy of directories much like Finder, as seen in the screenshot above.

If you double-click on the main.go file, VS Code might prompt you to install some additional Go tools — just click “Install All”.

You should then see the main.go file, e.g:

You can run this program from the Terminal really easily.

Change to the package directory,
e.g.cd ~/go/src/github.com/ryan0x44/go-helloworld
Use go run to execute the code,
e.g. go run main.go

The program should output “Hello world!”:

Great — now it’s time to start writing some code of your own!

4. Write Your First Go Program

You now know how the Workspace is structured and how to run a single file. Note that when you create your own programs, you can create packages without using GitHub e.g. hello-you can be your package name and you can place it under go/src/hello-you .

Using Finder or Terminal or VS Code, create a new directory under src called hello-you — to do this with the Terminal open a new window and type mkdir go/src/hello-you .

Now create a file called main.go under go/src/hello-you with the following:

package mainimport "fmt"func main() {
 name := "you"
 fmt.Printf("Hello %s", name)
}

This creates a variables called name with the value of “you”. The %s that you see in the first parameter of Printf is going to take the second parameter (our name variable), and print that as a string (the s in %s means “string”). See https://golang.org/pkg/fmt/ for more information about formatting options.

Try running building this program and running it in your Terminal:

cd go/src/hello-you
go build
./hello-you

You should see “Hello you”, or if you change the value of the name variable, then whatever that value was.

Running go build created a binary file called hello-you which you execute using ./hello-you . You can also use the go install command to have this file installed in your go/bin directory:

cd go/src/hello-you
go install
~/go/bin/hello-you

A nice homework project is to learn how to add your Workspace “bin” directory to your PATH environment variable (see the official Go Getting Started guide for help!) — once you’ve done that, any of the binaries in your go/bindirectory can be executed e.g. using hello-you no matter which directory your Terminal is in. Neat!

From here, if you haven’t already done so I’d highly recommend following A Tour of Go. As you learn new things, you can try them out in new packages/files.

You might want to also learn Git, which will help you keep backups and manage versions of your work, as well as allowing you to share it and collaborate on it with others.

Congratulations! You now have all the tools you need to start building amazing software in Go — we can’t wait to see what you create!