How To Install Go 1.17 on Ubuntu 20.04

Golang is an open-source programming language developed the Google. It provides easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software. This language is designed for writing servers, that’s why it is using widely these days. Go has released the latest version 1.17.

In this tutorial you will get instructions to install Go 1.17 on your Ubuntu 21.10 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux systems. Choose one the below methods for the installation of Go on your system.

Method 1 – Installing Go with Debian Repository

The official repositories contains some older version of Golang packages. During the writing of this tutorial, Ubuntu 20.04 repositories contains Golan 1.13.8 version.

Open a terminal and execute the following commands to install this version of Go on a Ubuntu system.

sudo apt update  
sudo apt install golang  

Once the installation finished, use below command to check installed Go version on Ubuntu.

go version 

go version go1.13.8 linux/amd64

The application required latest version of Go programing language. Follow below method.

Method 2 – Install Latest Go with Source code

Login to your Ubuntu system using ssh and upgrade to apply latest security updates there.

sudo apt-get update  
sudo apt-get -y upgrade  

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

wget https://dl.google.com/go/go1.17.7.linux-amd64.tar.gz 

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

sudo tar -xvf go1.17.7.linux-amd64.tar.gz   
sudo mv go /usr/local  

Now you need to setup 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 environment will be set for your current session only. To make it permanent add above commands in ~/.profile file.

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 go1.17.7 linux/amd64

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we have discussed two methods to install Golang on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux systems.