Fix your $GOPATH and $GOROOT

Don’t let $GOPATH and $GOROOT bite you.

When importing, Go tools looks for the packages inside the $GOROOT and $GOPATH/src directories. These are simply environment variables and you can set them to any other path as well. But, you don’t need to.

$GOPATH is called as the workspace directory for Go programs. Go source-code, belongs to you and to others lives here. So, when you import a package, Go searches that package inside this directory’s src directory.

You don’t need to set$GOROOT variable either. $GOPATH is also set to a default directory, it’s set to your user’s home directory in your operating system. This defaults to ~/go on my Mac, for example. You can change it to any other directory if you like but keep it there for now.

You can also provide more than one path to $GOPATH environment variable. In Mac, for example, I can define more than one directory separated with colons like this: /path/1:path/2

By the way, you can see all of the environment variables Go uses by typing: go env in your CLI. And then you can check whether those directories are existing or not. If they’re not, you can simply create them.

Alright, that’s all for now. Thank you for reading so far.

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