Managing Go installations

This topic describes how to install multiple versions of Go on the same machine, as well as how to uninstall Go.

For other content on installing, you might be interested in:

• Download and install -- The simplest way to get installed and running.
• Installing Go from source -- How to check out the sources, build them on your own machine, and run them.

Installing multiple Go versions

You can install multiple Go versions on the same machine. For example, you might want to test your code on multiple Go versions. For a list of versions you can install this way, see the download page.

Note: To install using the method described here, you'll need to have git installed.

To install additional Go versions, run the go install command, specifying the download location of the version you want to install. The following example illustrates with version 1.10.7:

$ go install golang.org/dl/go1.10.7@latest
$ go1.10.7 download

To run go commands with the newly-downloaded version, append the version number to the go command, as follows:

$ go1.10.7 version
go version go1.10.7 linux/amd64

When you have multiple versions installed, you can discover where each is installed, look at the version's GOROOT value. For example, run a command such as the following:

$ go1.10.7 env GOROOT

To uninstall a downloaded version, just remove the directory specified by its GOROOT environment variable and the goX.Y.Z binary.

Uninstalling Go

You can remove Go from your system using the steps described in this topic.

Removing user config and data

Go stores user configuration in the go directory within the user configuration directory, as returned by os.UserConfigDir. This can also be found as the directory containing the config file returned by go env GOENV.

Go stores intermediate build artifacts in the directory returned by go env GOCACHE. These can be removed with go clean -cache.

Go stores downloaded dependencies in the directory returned by go env GOMODCACHE. These can be removed with go clean -modcache.

Go stores binaries installed with go install in the Go bin directory, as returned by go env GOBIN (which defaults to $HOME/go/bin). These can be removed by deleting that directory. If you added this directory to your PATH environment variable, you should also remove it.

Linux Mac Windows

1. Remove /usr/local/go.

   This is the default installation directory.

2. Remove /usr/local/go from your PATH environment variable.

   Under Linux and FreeBSD, edit /etc/profile or $HOME/.profile.

3. If you manually added the Go bin directory (typically $HOME/go/bin) to your shell profile, for example by adding export PATH="$PATH:$(go env GOPATH)/bin", remove that entry.

4. Restart any open terminal sessions for the changes to take effect.