Go without (installing) go

This small Docker project was started to run go without installing go.

Why not installing a go compiler and toolchain provided by your Linux distribution?

These are some possible reasons:

• the compiler shipped by the distribution may not be the latest (or a recent) stable version released upstream;
• we may want to download and build a project and all its dependencies on a clean system all the time;
• we may want to cross compile a Go project;
• we may want to test different versions of the Go compiler.

Pre-requirements

Docker-CE must be installed and the docker daemon running.

Running a program in a container

make go run /source/helloworld.go

or (because /source is the workdir of the Docker container)

make go run helloworld.go

You can replace make by make QUIET=1 to reduce the verbosity of the output messages.

Compiling a program in a container

make go build helloworld.go
./source/helloworld

make go "get -v github.com/golang/example/hello/..."
./bin/hello

Cross compilation

make go GOENV="-e GOOS=darwin -e GOARCH=amd64" build helloworld.go
  >> ./source/helloworld
make go GOENV="-e GOOS=darwin -e GOARCH=amd64" "get -v github.com/golang/example/hello/..."
  >> bin/darwin_amd64/hello
file bin/darwin_amd64/hello
  >> bin/darwin_amd64/hello: Mach-O 64-bit x86_64 executable, flags:<NOUNDEFS>

Help message

make help

If you prefer, you can define the following two command aliases (in the file ~/.bashrc for instance)

alias dgo="sudo docker run -v $PWD/source:/source -v $PWD/bin:/go/bin --rm gowithoutgo_alpine"
alias dgofmt="sudo docker run -v $PWD/source:/source -v $PWD/bin:/go/bin --rm --entrypoint gofmt gowithoutgo_alpine"

and run and compile your Go project this way:

make image
. ~/.bashrc

dgo run helloworld.go

dgo build helloworld.go
./souces/helloworld

or format the source code with the tool gofmt:

dgofmt -w helloworld.go

Go language resources

Some resources for learning the Go language:

• Tour of Go (https://tour.golang.org/welcome/1)
• Go by Example (https://gobyexample.com/)
• Learning Go online book (https://www.miek.nl/go/)
• The Go Programming Language Specification (https://golang.org/ref/spec)