Go language project setup in Windows

I am new to Go language and I wanted to understand how the Go environment is setup.

There is two things I dont quite understand yet and I was hoping the community could clarify here.

What is the Go project setup like and how does the go path work?

I am asking this from a windows point of view.

• Do the Go projects have a standard way of being setup?
• Why are all the dependencies going to one location?
• Is it so they can be shared between multiple projects and not be version controlled?
• Should I set the go path per project to the project folder? I dont know.

The answer to all your questions are here: http://golang.org/doc/code.html
You should really read that page, but to sum up the main reason why you need to structure your go workspaces that way, is so the go tool (this includes the compiler and the tool for automatically downloading libraries) can do everything it does.

When you install a go program it is automatically put in $GOPATH/bin, and when you build a library it is automatically added to $GOPATH/pkg allowing you to have a centralized location for third party libraries and thus preventing you to do unnecessary copies of libraries. Your projects should be in $GOPATH/src/some_online_repository_location/project_name or $GOPATH/src/project_name. The last part of the path is the package name but you should read about that in http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#names

EXAMPLE: For you project hello that you host on github, the correct path on your go workspace is: $GOPATH/src/github.com/youruser/hello/. This allows the go tool to automatically download libraries from online repositories wit the command go get. Example: go get github.com/youruser/hello

Maintaining this "standard" allows the go tool to easily work in all systems without any configuration and it also has the side effect of making all go projects being structured in the same way, so when get someone else's code you know how it is structured and you know it will work on your current go workspace.

Read all the http://golang.org/doc/code.html document and you should understand it better.
Hope it helps, comment if you have any doubts.

An Example

GOPATH = c:\gocode  
App has 4 code files = msg.go (main), web.go, channel.go, date.go  
App uses 1 external library = martini  

**Source Locations**:  
c:\gocode\src\app\msg\		(package is msg)  
... web.go, channel.go  
c:\gocode\src\app\msg\main\	(package is main)  
... msg.go  				
c:\gocode\src\lib\		(package is lib)  
... date.go  
c:\gocode\src\github.com\go-martini\martini	(pkg is martini)  
... all martini lib files    

**Imports Used by File** ( Import Pkgs Not Files, All Paths Relative to $GOPATH/src )  
msg.go  
... import “app/msg”  > provides access to exported elements in web.go, channel.go  
... import “lib” > provides access to exported elements in date.go  
web.go  
... import “lib” > provides access to exported elements in date.go  
... import “github.com/go-martini/martini”  

Note:  
All files in the same pkg can access each other’s elements, even non exported ones.  
No import needed or allowed, just a plain reference, as thought it was in the same file.