Installing golang on Rocky Linux

Mar 18, 2023 golang

Perhaps more for my benifit but here lies instructions to install golang on a Raspberry PI running Rocky Linux.

Installing

sudo dnf install -y tar curl

For me, Rocky 9 on the PI did not come with tar pre-installed. Make sure you have these two tools available:

sudo dnf install -y \
  curl \
  tar

Download the binary from the official golang site:

$ curl https://go.dev/dl/go1.24.3.linux-arm64.tar.gz --output /tmp/go.tar.gz --location
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100    75  100    75    0     0    384      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--   386
100 71.3M  100 71.3M    0     0  27.7M      0  0:00:02  0:00:02 --:--:-- 33.3M

For those unfamiliar with curl:

--output /tmp/go.tar.gz tells curl to put the binary at the given filepath

--location tells curl to follow redirects

Verify the checksum matches the expected value on https://go.dev/dl/:

$ sha256sum /tmp/go.tar.gz
a463cb59382bd7ae7d8f4c68846e73c4d589f223c589ac76871b66811ded7836  /tmp/go.tar.gz

Extract the contents to /usr/local/go:

tar -zxvf /tmp/go.tar.gz -C /usr/local

Add go to the path on boot:

echo 'export GOROOT=/usr/local/go' | tee -a /etc/profile.d/golang.sh
echo 'export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin' | tee -a /etc/profile.d/golang.sh
echo 'export PATH=$PATH:$(go env GOPATH)/bin' | tee -a ~/.bash_profile

Apply those changes:

source /etc/profile.d/golang.sh
source ~/.bash_profile

Check the installation was successful and the go command is discoverable on the path.

$ go version
go version go1.24.3 linux/arm64

Some go libraries require a C compiler, this can be added with:

dnf install gcc-c++

Upgrading

Repeat the curl through tar extraction stage with the link of the new version. Simple.

Uninstalling

Clean-up cached files:

go clean -modcache
go clean -cache
go clean -fuzzcache

Remove the env var configurations:

rm /etc/profile.d/golang.sh
sed -i '/go env/d' ~/.bash_profile

A restart is required to reset the env vars that have been changed.

Finally remove the golang binaries:

rm /usr/local/go -r