golang: go install tries /usr/local instead of GOPATH

Question

This is somewhat a follow-up to my last question: golang: installing packages in a local directory

I have GOPATH set to $HOME/prog/go/gopath and this path exists with three directories:

~/prog/go/gopath$ ls
bin  pkg  src

Now I try to install a module to access the redis database which asks me to run

go install

inside the source directory. But the command go install gives me

~/prog/go/gopath/src/redis (go1)$ go install
go install flag: open /usr/local/go/pkg/darwin_amd64/flag.a: permission denied
~/prog/go/gopath/src/redis (go1)$ echo $GOPATH 
<myhomedir>/prog/go/gopath

(where <myhomedir> is a valid path)

Question 1: why does go install not take $GOPATH into account? Question 2: how to convince go install to use $GOPATH?

Solution 1

Not sure how you setup go but it's possible that it needs to build packages from std library but can't due to permissions. You can try

cd /usr/local/go/src
sudo ./all.bash

This should build the std library and run tests to make sure everything is ok.

Make sure you have proper permissions to read and execute from $GOROOT as necessary. Personally I just download the archive from golang.org and keep it under ~/local/go and set GOROOT appropriately.

Solution 2

Similar problems here. When I check my $GOROOT, I find that all the libraries are already built there. But for some reasons, it tries to rebuild all the libraries. So I just do a little trick:

find /usr/lib/go/pkg/ -name "*.*" | sudo xargs touch

Then everything just work fine.

Solution 3

I think the command you need is "go get":

go get github.com/alphazero/Go-Redis

will download the Go-Redis library and put it into your $GOPATH/src directory.

go install performs a compile and install on your own source code.

I must admit, I struggled with this whole concept for a bit, but a careful re-reading of "How to Write Go" and the code organization section contains what you need to know about how the go command works.

Comments

[topskip]

I am not sure I understand what it does. My go installation works fine so far. Never had any problems and even cross compiling works fine.

[dskinner]

do you have permission to read /usr/local/go/pkg/darwin_amd64/flag.a ?

[topskip]

yes, I can read /usr/local/go/pkg/darwin_amd64/flag.a as my main user

[topskip]

... btw: the go get should be without https:// from what I have tried. Thanks for the link to "How to Write Go"!

[weberc2]

Isn't GOPATH a list of paths (analogous to PATH)? That's what the documentation says, if I recall correctly. Are you sure you don't mean GOROOT?

[scaganoff]

GOROOT points to where the Go binary is installed. GOPATH is a list of Workspaces. There is more detail at golang.org/doc/code.html

[gravitation]

I had the same issue and running ./all.bash as root fixed it. Not sure what the deal was: my permissions on the .a's were correct and it seemed to be trying to rebuild packages that were already built. Might have something to do with timestamps.

[Jonathan Oliver]

Because of timestamp differences between the files in $GOROOT/src and $GOROOT/pkg, the pkg files are determined to be out of date and are attempting to be rebuilt. But because they're not writable by the user, there's a permission denied error. Touching each .a file fixes the problem.

[Jonathan Oliver]

The command I ran was slightly different: find /usr/local/go -name "*.a" -exec touch -r `which go` {} \;