How To Install Go 1.20 CentOS/RHEL 9/8

Go is an open source programming language developed by a team at Google. It provides easy-to-build simple, reliable, and efficient software. This language is designed for writing servers, that’s why it is used widely these days. Go has released the latest version 1.20 recently.

This tutorial will help you to install Go 1.20 on your CentOS and RHEL 9/8/7 systems. You can also use tutorials to install Go lang on Ubuntu and Debian systems.

Prerequisites

Log in to your Red Hat or its derivative system using ssh and upgrade to apply the latest security updates there. Execute the following command on the terminal.

yum update 

Step 1 – Installing Go

Now download the Go language binary archive file using the following link. To find and download latest version available or 32 bit version go to official download page.

wget https://go.dev/dl/go1.20.5.linux-amd64.tar.gz 

Now extract the downloaded archive and install it to the desired location on your system. For this tutorial, I am installing it under the /usr/local directory. You can also put this under the home directory (for shared hosting) or other locations.

tar -xzf go1.20.5.linux-amd64.tar.gz 
mv go /usr/local 

Step 2 – Setup Go Environment

Now you need to set up Go language environment variables for your project. Commonly you need to set 3 environment variables as GOROOT, GOPATH and PATH.

• GOROOT is the location where Go package is installed on your system.

  export GOROOT=/usr/local/go 
  

• GOPATH is the location of your work directory. For example my project directory is ~/Projects/Proj1 .

  export GOPATH=$HOME/Projects/Proj1 
  

• Now set the PATH variable to access go binary system wide.

  export PATH=$GOPATH/bin:$GOROOT/bin:$PATH 
  

All the above environments will be set for your current session only. To make it permanent add the above commands in ~/.bash_profile file.

Step 3 – Verify Installation

At this step, you have successfully installed and configured go language on your system. First, use the following command to check the Go version.

go version 

go version go1.20 linux/amd64

Now also verify all configured environment variables using the following command.

go env 

GOARCH="amd64"
GOBIN=""
GOEXE=""
GOHOSTARCH="amd64"
GOHOSTOS="linux"
GOOS="linux"
GOPATH="/root/Projects/Proj1"
GORACE=""
GOROOT="/usr/local/go"
GOTOOLDIR="/usr/local/go/pkg/tool/linux_amd64"
GCCGO="gccgo"
CC="gcc"
GOGCCFLAGS="-fPIC -m64 -pthread -fmessage-length=0 -fdebug-prefix-map=/tmp/go-build764105058=/tmp/go-build -gno-record-gcc-switches"
CXX="g++"
CGO_ENABLED="1"
CGO_CFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_CPPFLAGS=""
CGO_CXXFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_FFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_LDFLAGS="-g -O2"
PKG_CONFIG="pkg-config"

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you have learned to install Golang on CentOS/RHEL Linux systems.