'go install' will not find package “fmt”

Question

I installed go 1.7.4 by untarring it into ~/go and setting GOROOT accordingly. I also created ~/work/src/github.com/user/hello and set GOPATH accordingly.

When trying the hello world example from https://golang.org/doc/install#testing I get the following error:

$ go install github.com/user/hello
    ../work/src/github.com/user/hello/hello.go:3:8: cannot find package "fmt" in any of:
    /home/user/go/src/pkg/fmt (from $GOROOT)
    /home/user/work/src/fmt (from $GOPATH)
package github.com/user/hello
    imports runtime: cannot find package "runtime" in any of:
    /home/user/go/src/pkg/runtime (from $GOROOT)
    /home/user/work/src/runtime (from $GOPATH)

Checking ~/go, I find fmt in ~/go/src/fmt and not ~/go/src/pkg/fmt

It feels like I am missing something crucial. Thankful for assistance.

Answer 1

If you installed Go from a package manager before, you might have an old version. Check go version and remove the old version if needed.

Answer 2

For MacPorts users with eg go 1.10.3 installed, it didn't seem to be correctly installed for me. The runtime standard packages were missing. I even tried uninstalling and reinstalling a clean copy. So I just removed it and got the official darwin binary package from google:

https://golang.org/dl/