GOROOT is not always neccessary
The GOROOT
environment variable specifies the location of the Go installation on your system. In some cases, you may not need to set the GOROOT
variable manually, because Go will automatically detect the location of the installation based on the value of the PATH
environment variable.
The PATH
variable specifies the directories that should be searched for executables. When you type a command in the terminal, the system searches the directories listed in PATH
to find the executable. By default, the go
command is installed in the bin
directory of the Go installation, so if the bin
directory is in your PATH
, the go
command will be available to you.
For example, if you have installed Go in /usr/local/go
and you have added /usr/local/go/bin
to your PATH
, you will be able to use the go
command without setting the GOROOT
variable. The go
command will automatically detect the location of the Go installation based on the directories in your PATH
.
However, there are some cases where you may need to set the GOROOT
variable manually. For example, if you have multiple versions of Go installed on your system and you want to specify which version to use, you can set the GOROOT
variable to the location of the desired Go installation.