Install Golang on WSL

Go is a modern programming language developed at Google at around 2007 to improve programming productivity. It is increasingly popular for its many applications like Docker, Kubernetes and popular static site generator like Hugo.

In this tutorial, we will install Go on our Windows Linux Subsystem environment.

First, we will install it using Ubuntu’s package manager, and then we will install it using the binary distribution.

Check version

Before we do anything lets check what version of Linux we have installed.

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS
Release:        18.04
Codename:       bionic

Our current version is 18.04, and the LTS means Long Term Support

From the beginning, Ubuntu has its packages, and we can install go within the apt-get utility

Easy way

Open the terminal and lets update & upgrade our APT package utility and install go

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get install golang-go

Check

Let us check if it installed correctly

$ go version
// go version go1.10.4 linux/amd64

Install Binary Distribution

Let’s say we wanted to get the latest version, we would have to install the official binary distribution.

We first go to https://golang.org/dl/ and select a compatible release according to our OS

go1.11.5.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Let us open our terminal download our file and extract it in our current directory.

wget https://dl.google.com/go/go1.11.5.linux-amd64.tar.gz
$ sudo tar -xvf go1.11.5.linux-amd64.tar.gz

tar : stores/extracts files from the archive
x : extracts the file from target
v : verbosly list files process
f : use archive file

Now we have a folder /go on our current directory. Let us move it to /usr/local/

sudo mv go /usr/local

Set Enviroments

Our last step is to add our global variables on our .bahsrc or .profile file.

sudo nano ~/.bashrc

scroll down and add these to your .bashrc profile


# Go Global variables
export GOROOT=/usr/local/go
export GOPATH=$HOME/go
export PATH=$GOPATH/bin:$GOROOT/bin:$PATH

To save it Ctrl + o, and to exit nano Ctrl + x

update current session

source ~/.bashrc

Check

go version
// go version go1.11.5 linux/amd64

References