Update: It turns out that this setup is not needed, you should a have single GOPATH directory with all of your projects inside it, and use the vendor feature to handle each project dependencies. More details in a new post.

When working with Go language you must setup the GOPATH environment variable, but soon you will face two problems:

• Each project should have its own Go dependencies and its own Git code repo, so putting your source under GOPATH would be problematic.
• When working with “Atom” with “Go Plus” plugin, it needs to install several Go packages which would pollute your own source.

To solve both problems I added the following to my “.bash_login”:

export GOPATH=$HOME/go
alias atom='PATH=$PATH:$HOME/go/bin GOPATH=$HOME/go:$GOPATH atom'
gpp() {
        export GOPATH=`pwd`
}

It perform the following:

• Set a default GOPATH to $HOME/go_sandbox for testing small Go projects
• Set an alias for “atom” to add an extra dir in GOPATH and PATH, so whatever GO Plus plugin add won’t be add to your current GOPATH
• Setup a “gpp” function to quickly change GOPATH to current directory

• development
• go
• golang
• linux