Introduction to Go workspaces

One of the unique features of the Go programming language is its concept of workspaces. In Go, a workspace is essentially the “home base” for your development projects.

By default, Go sets up the workspace at $HOME/go, which is a folder located in your home directory. This folder is automatically created when you install a package or set up Go on your system. In addition to your projects, the workspace also serves as a storage location for various Go tools.

For instance, when I loaded the hello.go file in VS Code, I was prompted to install several essential tools such as [gopls](https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/tools/gopls), the Delve debugger (dlv), and the [staticcheck linter](https://staticcheck.io/). These tools were automatically installed under the $HOME/go directory, which is part of the default workspace setup.

Whenever you use the go install command to install packages, they will be stored within the workspace, specifically in the GOPATH. The GOPATH is an environment variable that determines the location where Go should install packages.

One advantage of having a designated workspace is the ability to change the GOPATH environment variable. This allows you to customize the location where Go saves your packages. This can be particularly useful when working on multiple projects simultaneously and you want to ensure that the libraries used by each project are isolated from one another.

tags: [“Go workspaces”, “workspace setup”, “GOPATH”, “Go tools”]