# Go Basics

This document is designed for developers new to the go language, especially experiecned developers who are learning go for the purpose of using tepleton.

Go is a rather simple language, which aims to produce for fast, maintainable programs, while minimizing development effort.  In order to speed up development, the go community has adopted quite a number of conventions, which are used in almost every open source project. The same way one rails dev can learn a new project quickly as they all have the same enforced layout, programming following these conventions allows interoperability with much of the go tooling, and a much more fluid development experience.

First of all, you should read through [Effective Go](https://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html) to get a feel for the language and the constructs. And maybe pick up a book, read a tutorial, or do what you feel best to feel comfortable with the syntax.

Second, you need to set up your go environment.  In go, all code hangs out GOPATH.  You don't have a separate root directory for each project. Pick a nice locations (like `$HOME/go`) and `export GOPATH` in your startup scripts (`.bashrc` or the like). Now, when you run `go get github.com/tepleton/basecoin`, this will create the directory `$GOPATH/src/github.com/tepleton/basecoin`, checkout the master branch with git, and try to compile if there are any scripts.  All your repos will fit under GOPATH with a similar logic.  Just pick good names for your github repos. If you put your code outside of GOPATH/src or have a path other than the url of the repo, you can expect errors.  There are ways to do this, but quite complex and not worth the bother.

Third, every repo in `$GOPATH/src` is checkout out of a version control system (commonly git), and you can go into those directories and manipulate them like any git repo (`git checkout develop`, `git pull`, `git remote set-url origin $MY_FORK`).  `go get -u $REPO` is a nice convenience to do a `git pull` on the master branch and recompile if needed.  If you work on develop, get used to using the git commands directly in these repos.

Fourth, installing a go program is rather easy if you know what to do.  First to note is all programs compiles with `go install` end up in `$GOPATH/bin`, you probably want a line like `export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin` in your startup scripts. `go get` will checkout the repo, then try to `go install` it. Many repos are mainly a library that also export (one or more) commands, in these cases there is a subdir called `cmd`, with a different subdir for each command, using the command name as the directory name.  To compile these commands, you can go something like `go install github.com/tepleton/basecoin/cmd/basecoin` or to compile all the commands `go install github.com/tepleton/basecoin/cmd/...` (... is a go tooling shortcut for all subdirs, like `*`).

Fifth, there is not good dependency management built into go, if I import another repo, I just compile against the latest master branch, or whichever version you have checked out.  This can cause serious issues, and there is tooling to do dependency management.  As of go 1.6, the `vendor` directory is standard and a copy of a repo will be used rather than the repo under GOPATH.  In order to create and maintain the code in the vendor directory, various tools have been created, with [glide](https://github.com/Masterminds/glide) being popular and in use in all the tepleton repos. In this case, `go install` is not enough.  If you are working on code from the tepleton, you will usually want to do:

```
go get github.com/tepleton/$REPO
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/tepleton/$REPO
make get_vendor_deps
make install
make test
```

`make get_vendor_deps` should update the vendor directory using glide, `make install` will compile all commands.  `make test` is good to run the test suite and make sure things are working with your environment... failing tests are much easier to debug than a malfunctioning program.

Okay, that's it, with this info you should be able to follow along and trouble-shoot any issues you have with the rest of the guide.
