Oracle Linux - Install Google golang

Go (often referred to as golang) is a free and open source programming language created at Google. Even though Go is not the most popular programming language arround at this moment (sorry for all the golang people) there are still a lot of opensource projects that depend on Go. The installation from go is realtive simple however different from what the average Oracle Linux user used to do everything with yum command might expect.

If you want to install golang you will have to download the .tar.gz file and "install" it manually. The following steps are needed to get golang on your Oracle Linux machine:

Step 1
Download the file from the golang website

[root@jenkins-dev tmp]# curl -O https://storage.googleapis.com/golang/go1.8.linux-amd64.tar.gz
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 85.6M  100 85.6M    0     0  7974k      0  0:00:10  0:00:10 --:--:-- 10.1M
[root@jenkins-dev tmp]#

Step 2
Execute a checksum and verify the result with what is mentioned on the golang download site.

[root@jenkins-dev tmp]# sha256sum go1.8.linux-amd64.tar.gz
53ab94104ee3923e228a2cb2116e5e462ad3ebaeea06ff04463479d7f12d27ca  go1.8.linux-amd64.tar.gz
[root@jenkins-dev tmp]#

Step 3
Unpack the file into /usr/local

[root@jenkins-dev tmp]# tar -C /usr/local/ -xzf go1.8.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Step 4
verify that go in in the right location

[root@jenkins-dev tmp]# ls -la /usr/local/go
total 168
drwxr-xr-x  11 root root  4096 Feb 16 14:29 .
drwxr-xr-x. 13 root root  4096 Mar  1 14:47 ..
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  4096 Feb 16 14:27 api
-rw-r--r--   1 root root 33243 Feb 16 14:27 AUTHORS
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  4096 Feb 16 14:29 bin
drwxr-xr-x   4 root root  4096 Feb 16 14:29 blog
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  1366 Feb 16 14:27 CONTRIBUTING.md
-rw-r--r--   1 root root 45710 Feb 16 14:27 CONTRIBUTORS
drwxr-xr-x   8 root root  4096 Feb 16 14:27 doc
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  5686 Feb 16 14:27 favicon.ico
drwxr-xr-x   3 root root  4096 Feb 16 14:27 lib
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  1479 Feb 16 14:27 LICENSE
drwxr-xr-x  14 root root  4096 Feb 16 14:29 misc
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  1303 Feb 16 14:27 PATENTS
drwxr-xr-x   7 root root  4096 Feb 16 14:29 pkg
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  1399 Feb 16 14:27 README.md
-rw-r--r--   1 root root    26 Feb 16 14:27 robots.txt
drwxr-xr-x  46 root root  4096 Feb 16 14:27 src
drwxr-xr-x  17 root root 12288 Feb 16 14:27 test
-rw-r--r--   1 root root     5 Feb 16 14:27 VERSION
[root@jenkins-dev tmp]#

Step 5
add golang to your $path variable to make it available system wide and check if you can use go

[root@jenkins-dev tmp]#

[root@jenkins-dev tmp]# go --version
-bash: go: command not found
[root@jenkins-dev tmp]#
[root@jenkins-dev tmp]# PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin
[root@jenkins-dev tmp]#
[root@jenkins-dev tmp]# go version
go version go1.8 linux/amd64
[root@jenkins-dev tmp]#

This in effect would ensure that you now have the option to use Golang on your Oracle Linux system.