Update: Since this post was written, Go 1.11beta2 has been released. I’ve updated the setup section to reflect this. Russ Cox kindly wrote to me to explain the reasoning behind storing the Go module cache in $GOPATH . I’ve included his response inline.

This weekend I wanted to play with Ubuntu 18.04 on a spare machine. This gave me a perfect excuse to try out the modules feature recently merged into the Go 1.11 development branch.

TL;DR: When Go 1.11 ships you’ll be able to download the tarball and unpack it anywhere you like. When Go 1.11 ships you’ll be able to write Go modules anywhere you like.

Setup

The recently released Go 1.11beta2 has support for Go modules.

% curl https://dl.google.com/go/go1.11beta2.linux-amd64.tar.gz | \

tar xz --transform=s/^go/go1.11/g

% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current

Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed

100 169M 100 169M 0 0 23.6M 0 0:00:07 0:00:07 --:--:-- 21.2M

% go1.11/bin/go version go version go1.11beta2 linux/amd64

That’s all you need to do to install Go 1.11beta2. Out of shot, I’ve added $HOME/go1.11/bin to my $PATH .

Kicking the tires

Now we have a version of Go with module support installed, I wanted to try to use it to manage the dependencies for httpstat, a clone of the Python tool of the same name that many collaborators swarmed on to build in late 2016.

To show that Go 1.11 won’t need you to declare a $GOPATH or use a specific directly layout for the location of your project, I’m going to use my favourite directory for source code, ~/devel .

% git clone https://github.com/davecheney/httpstat devel/httpstat

Cloning into 'devel/httpstat'...

remote: Counting objects: 2326, done.

remote: Total 2326 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 2326

Receiving objects: 100% (2326/2326), 8.73 MiB | 830.00 KiB/s, done.

Resolving deltas: 100% (673/673), done.

Checking out files: 100% (1361/1361), done.

% cd devel/httpstat % go mod -init -module github.com/davecheney/httpstat

go: creating new go.mod: module github.com/davecheney/httpstat

go: copying requirements from Gopkg.lock

Nice, go mod -init translated my existing Gopkg.lock file into its own go.mod format.

% cat go.mod

module github.com/davecheney/httpstat

require (

github.com/fatih/color v1.5.0

github.com/mattn/go-colorable v0.0.9

github.com/mattn/go-isatty v0.0.3

golang.org/x/net v0.0.0-20170922011244-0744d001aa84

golang.org/x/sys v0.0.0-20170922123423-429f518978ab

golang.org/x/text v0.0.0-20170915090833-1cbadb444a80

)

Let’s give it a try

% go build

go: finding golang.org/x/net v0.0.0-20170922011244-0744d001aa84

go: finding github.com/mattn/go-colorable v0.0.9

go: finding github.com/mattn/go-isatty v0.0.3

go: finding golang.org/x/sys v0.0.0-20170922123423-429f518978ab

go: finding github.com/fatih/color v1.5.0

go: finding golang.org/x/text v0.0.0-20170915090833-1cbadb444a80

go: downloading github.com/fatih/color v1.5.0

go: downloading github.com/mattn/go-isatty v0.0.3

go: downloading golang.org/x/net v0.0.0-20170922011244-0744d001aa84

go: downloading github.com/mattn/go-colorable v0.0.9

go: downloading golang.org/x/text v0.0.0-20170915090833-1cbadb444a80

Very nice, go build ignored the vendor/ folder in this repository (because we’re outside $GOPATH ) and fetched the revisions it needed. Let’s try out the binary and make sure it works.

% ./httpstat golang.org

Connected to 216.58.196.145:443

HTTP/2.0 200 OK

Server: Google Frontend

Alt-Svc: quic=":443"; ma=2592000; v="44,43,39,35"

Cache-Control: private

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2018 08:20:43 GMT Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000; preload

Vary: Accept-Encoding

X-Cloud-Trace-Context: 323cd59570cc084fed506f7e85d79d9f

Body discarded



Move along, nothing to see here.

Go module source cache

In the previous version of this article I included a footnote mentioning that go get in module mode stored its downloaded source in $GOPATH/src/mod not the cache added in Go 1.10. Russ Cox kindly wrote to me to explain the rational behind this choice and also copied this to a recent thread on golang-dev. For completeness, here is his response:

The build cache ($GOCACHE, defaulting to $HOME/.cache/go-build) is for storing recent compilation results, so that if you need to do that exact compilation again, you can just reuse the file. The build cache holds entries that are like “if you run this exact compiler on these exact inputs. this is the output you’d get.” If the answer is not in the cache, your build uses a little more CPU to run the compiler nstead of reusing the output. But you are guaranteed to be able to run the compiler instead, since you have the exact inputs and the compiler binary (or else you couldn’t even look up the answer in the cache). The module cache ($GOPATH/src/mod, defaulting to $HOME/go/src/mod) is for storing downloaded source code, so that every build does not redownload the same code and does not require the network or the original code to be available. The module cache holds entries that are like “if you need to download mymodule@v1.2.3, here are the files you’d get.” If the answer is not in the cache, you have to go out to the network. Maybe you don’t have a network right now. Maybe the code has been deleted. It’s not anywhere near guaranteed that you can redownload the sources and also get the same result. Hopefully you can, but it’s not an absolute certainty like for the build cache. (The go.sum file will detect if you get a different answer on re-download, but knowing you got the wrong bits doesn’t help you make progress on actually building your code. Also these paths end up in file-line information in binaries, so they show up in stack traces, and the like and feed into tools like text editors or debuggers that don’t necessarily know how to trigger the right cache refresh.)

Wrap up

You can build Go 1.11 from source right now anywhere you like. You don’t need to set an environment variable or follow a predefined location.