Local Development Environments for Go using asdf.

Over the years I have dealt with different ways to setup a project for Python & Go. I am sharing how I setup my personal and work projects for extensibility and modularity.

There are a lot of ways to setup Python dev environments and Go but this is what works best for me and how I get higher adoption at work for my projects. (This can be extended for any language btw Node or Rust even).

I will write up how I setup Go projects in this post & then follow up with a Python version which adopts a lot the same concepts.

Assumptions:

1. You have homebrew homebrew install
2. You are using MacOS or Linux.

Step 1: Pre-reqs:

1. asdf: Installing asdf this is how you can manage different versions of languages and use them across projects ~~2. Installing Poetry (for Python only) is a way to manage dependencies & virtual environments in Python. This was shown to me by Data Scientist at work and I would never go back using any other method. ~~ this will be relevant for the Python blog post

Step 1: Setup for both install asdf & add to your shell (I use zsh, so adjust if you use bash or something else).

• brew install asdf
• echo -e "\n. $(brew --prefix asdf)/libexec/asdf.sh" >> ~/.zsh_profile

Step 2: Go Setup

In asdf the order of operations is adding a 1. language plugin, 2. adding a version(s) and 3.then setting the language locally or globally for your projects

Setup Langauge Plugin

• Setting up asdf for go run asdf plugin add golang
• adding different go versions if you want the latest run asdf install golang latest
• OR install a specific version running asdf install golang 1.19

Setup Local & Global Version

In this case I have a hello-go directory that i want to use Go 1.19 in order to do that you would run

• asdf local golang 1.19

Init a baseline project.

Get the current directory and init a go project

• run pwd which will output the directory /Users/ramzi/documents/projects/hello-go in my case.
• run go mod init documents/projects/hello-go

• Create hello.go file by running touch hello.go and add in the following code:
  

• Run go run hello.go and you should get your output printed!
  

Closing Thoughts

The purpose of this is when you need to have multiple version of a language across different projects and you want to keep this binaries separate. With asdf you can set a global version (which I do not recommend) but to do so you will run asdf global golang 1.19 for example.

This is especially important as a Python developer which I will share in an upcoming blog post.