Install a Go binary, keep dependencies / packages

Question

When I build a Go binary, I usually do something like this:

go build -ldflags "-X main.basedir somevar" -o mybuilddir/bin/myfile mypackage/main"

this builds the binary and places it in a custom directory. But this doesn't keep the "intermediate" package files beneath pkg/ , which would speed up the next compilation runs.

The solution would be go install , but I cannot specify an output directory. It seems to be possible to set the binary directory with GOBIN , but I am unable to specify the name of the executable (always main ).

What is a possible solution to this problem?

• Custom destionation directory
• Custom name (not main )
• Keep intermediate generated package files ( .a )

---

This is the src directory of GOPATH :

GOPATH/src$ tree 
.
└── mypackage
    ├── packagea
    │   └── packagea.go
    ├── packageb
    │   └── packageb.go
    └── main
        └── mypackage.go

With go install , the package files ( .a ) are created in $GOPATH/pkg , with go build , I can't find the .a files anywhere.

Answer 1

Update Nov. 2017: Go 1.10 (Q1 2018) will add caching for go build and go install: see " go build rebuilds unnecessarily ".

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Original answer (2014)

With go install , the package files ( .a ) are created in $GOPATH/pkg , with go build , I can't find the .a files anywhere.

As mentioned in " How does the go build command work ? "

The final step is to pack the object file into an archive file, .a , which the linker and the compiler consume.

Because we invoked go build on a package, the result is discarded as $WORK is deleted after the build completes .
If we invoke go install -x two additional lines appear in the output

mkdir -p /home/dfc/go/pkg/linux_arm/crypto/
cp $WORK/crypto/hmac.a /home/dfc/go/pkg/linux_arm/crypto/hmac.a

This demonstrates the difference between go build and install ;

• build builds,
• install builds then installs the result to be used by other builds.