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I read everywhere that my GOPATH must be set to my workspace. If I do that and use go get to get packages from for example GitHub, they are all added to my workspace though, which I don't find particularly useful because it clutters my workspace. In my workspace I expect to find MY code and my code only.

So I now have my own repos in ~/repos/go and left my GOPATH to be the default ~/go. This works perfect. All libraries I import live in ~/go, which keeps my own workplace ~/repos/go nice and clean. This works great for me, so I'm not sure why this is not the recommended way of working.

Am I missing something? Are there things I break or are functionalities not working in this way?

Edit

To explain why my question is different from this question: I know what GOPATH does (define a place to put packages when using go get and a place to import packages from), but I was unaware of why you need to have the public code in the same place as your own code. Turns out there is no need for it, as explained by @peterSO in the (excellent) answer I accepted below.

halfer
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kramer65
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  • If you're using GOPATH, all packages must be in GOPATH to work. You may be inadvertently mixing module and GOPATH behavior here, but you can save yourself a lot of pain later by just following the documentation. – JimB Feb 01 '19 at 14:48
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    Possible duplicate of [Can someone explain why GOPATH is convenient and how it should be used in general?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24306183/can-someone-explain-why-gopath-is-convenient-and-how-it-should-be-used-in-genera) – Jonathan Hall Feb 01 '19 at 17:04

2 Answers2

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go help gopath

Go searches each directory listed in GOPATH to find source code, but new packages are always downloaded into the first directory in the list.

$GOPATH is a directory list. For example, on Linux,

export GOPATH=$HOME/gopublic:$HOME/goprivate

go get places all downloads in the first directory in the list: $HOME/gopublic. Put all your packages in the second directory in the list: $HOME/goprivate.

peterSO
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  • This is great! So the reason I also want the `$HOME/goprivate` in there is because it enables me to also import from packages that I've written myself? Or are there other reasons to also include `$HOME/goprivate` in the GOPATH? – kramer65 Feb 02 '19 at 02:03
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GOPATH is a default directory that the golang toolchain looks at when you're attempting to compile code. It's not technically 100% necessary to set a custom one, as if I recall correctly, it defaults to ~/go/.

As peterSO said above, GOPATH is a list and puts packages into the first entry.

Virepri
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