Don't Cut Corners On Go Setup

I set up a Go development environment last month, and I’m having a great time with it! (Mark Bates’ advice has been awesome!) But when I tried setting up a GoConvey test server I kept getting weird errors, like…

Potential error parsing output of […] ; couldn’t handle this stray line: flag provided but not defined: -covermode

I tried all kinds of things suggested on various blogs; even removing Go and installing it from source. Nothing worked.

Turns out that GoConvey is sensitive to the Go configuration, because it has to find certain directories for test and code coverage results. And I had cut a major corner in my setup!

Set Up the Directory Hierarchy Right

The Go documentation recommends a very specific directory hierarchy for use in development. For example, your source code should live in

$GOROOT/src/github.com/<username>/<projectname>.

There should also be bin/ and pkg/ directories under $GOROOT.

I thought, “well, I’m not developing packages to deploy on GitHub yet, so I don’t really need to do that. I’ll just throw Go files any old place. Hey, look, things work!”

Nope nope nope nope nope. Do it right! Because, hey, what do you know, tools expect things to be where they belong!

Then Re-Get the Packages

So I set up the directories correctly and moved my projects under $GOROOT/src/github.com/bobgilmore/, but things still didn’t work right. The errors went away, but I got 404’s whenever I hit the local GoConvey server.

I decided that the packages were probably compiled with bad paths, or something, so I deleted the contents of my bin/ and pkg/ directories and refetched the packages I needed via

go get [...]

Bang, problem solved!