Setting up your machine

Your machine will contain many version control repositories (managed by Git, for example).

Each repository contains one or more packages, but will typically be a single module.

Each package consists of one or more Go source files in a single directory.

The path to a package's directory determines its import path and where it can be downloaded from if you decide to host it on a remote version control system like Github or Gitlab.

A note on GOPATH

The $GOPATH environment variable will be set by default somewhere on your machine (typically in the home directory, ~/go). Since we will be working in the new "Go modules" setup, you don't need to worry about that. If you read something online about setting up your GOPATH, that documentation is probably out of date.

These days you should avoid working in the $GOPATH/src directory. Again, that's the old way of doing things and can cause unexpected issues, so better to just avoid it.

Get into your workspace

Navigate to a location on your machine where you want to store some code. For example, I store all my code in ~/workspace, then organize it into subfolders based on the remote location. For example,

~/workspace/github.com/wagslane/go-password-validator = https://github.com/wagslane/go-password-validator

That said, you can put your code wherever you want.