Upgrading or Downgrading Go - Practical Go Lessons https://www.practical-go-lessons.
com/chap-40-upgrading-or-downgrading-go
Chapter 40: Upgrading or Downgrading Go
1 What will you learn in this chapter?
• How to upgrade (or downgrade) Go on your computer.
2 Technical concepts covered
• SHA256
3 Checking your version
To get the currently installed version of Go, just type :
$ go version
This will output something like that :
go version go1.11.1 darwin/amd64
The version is printed with the reference of your system (in my case Apple MacOS)
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4 Where is your Go binary?
To upgrade your system to a new version of go, you have to locate where Go is on your system.
$ which go
Wich will locate the program file in the user path (cf. man which)
Usually (Linux and Mac users), if you type this on your system, it will display :
/usr/local/go/bin/go
For windows users, the path where the go binaries are stored is usually.
C:\Go\bin
To be sure, you can run the command :
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Upgrading or Downgrading Go - Practical Go Lessons https://www.practical-go-lessons.com/chap-40-upgrading-or-downgrading-go
c:\> where go
We have successfully located the binaries; now we can upgrade it
5 Download a new version
New versions of Go are hosted on the golang.org website here: https://golang.org/dl/. Always download your go version from this official
URL.
To update your current version, download on this website the targeted version.
To be sure that you have downloaded a valid binary, you have to compute the SHA256 sum of the downloaded file. Then you have to
ensure that it is strictly equal to the one that is listed on the website (see 1).
Webpage to download go binaries[fig:Webpage-to-download]
5.0.0.1 On macOS
To check a sha256 sum, open a terminal and type :
$ shasum -a 256 go1.11.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz
The a flag is used to indicate which algorithm to use (here it’s SHA256)
5.0.0.2 On Linux
The command is shorter :
$ sha256sum go1.11.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz
5.0.0.3 On Windows
You can use certutil to do so on the command prompt
> certutil -hashfile go1.11.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz SHA256
6 Install the (new/old) version
6.1 On macOS
You downloaded an installer. It will automatically install the selected version. Just double-click on the file downloaded.
6.2 On Linux
6.2.0.0.1 Archive extraction
First, you have to extract the archive downloaded with the following command :
$ sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.11.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz
It will extract the contents of the tar.gz file into /usr/local :
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Upgrading or Downgrading Go - Practical Go Lessons https://www.practical-go-lessons.com/chap-40-upgrading-or-downgrading-go
Contents of /usr/local/go (Go v.1.16)
The bin directory contains two executables files at the time of writing :
• go
• gofmt
6.2.0.0.2 PATH modification
To be able to launch go and gofmt commands, you will need to add this directory to your PATH. To do so, add this line at the top of the file
.bashrc located in your home directory. (or .zshrc if you use zsh) :
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin
After that, you will need to restart your terminal for the change to take effect.
6.3 On Windows
You downloaded an installer. it will automatically install the selected version. Just double-click on the file downloaded.
Bibliography
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Practical Go Lessons
By Maximilien Andile
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