Building Code Locally
Explore how to set up a Go development environment by creating modules with go.mod files, managing dependencies with go mod tidy, and compiling Go code using go run and go build commands. This lesson equips you with essential skills to develop and execute Go programs on your local system efficiently.
The current Go ecosystem (Go 1.13 onward) and toolchain allow us to write Go code from any location in the filesystem. Most users choose to set up a local Git repository for their package(s) and develop within that directory.
This is accomplished using Go modules that the Go team describes as “a collection of Go packages stored in a file tree with a go.mod file at its root.” A Go module most often represents a GitHub repository, such as github.com/user/repository.
Most Go developers will use the command line to move around the filesystem environment and for interacting with the Go toolchain. In this section, we will concentrate on using Unix commands for accessing the filesystem and using Go compiler tools. The Go compiler commands will be the same between each OS, but filesystem commands may not be, and the file paths may also differ, such as Windows using \ instead of ...