Setting up a dev container for Go

Primary author: Maxim Chadaev
Reviewer: Daniel Henderson

Initial Setup

To create a project, run mkdir <name> and cd <project-name> for your specific project
Then, you need to intiialize a git repo with git init
Add a readme file to make your first commit with

echo "# My Rust Project" > README.md
git add README.md
git commit -m "Initial commit with README"

Then, to create a Remote Repository on Github, login to Github and go to the 'Create a New Repository Page`
Choose your settings and details, and choose the same name as your project and create the repository
Then, add the Github repository as a remote with git remote add origin https://github.com/<your-username>/<project-name>. Make sure you replace <your-username> and <project-name> with your GitHub username and project name respectively.
Check the default branch with git branch and if it is not main, rename it with git branch -M main.
Then push it with git push --set-upstream origin main

Set up Devcontainer

Create a directory .devcontainer.
Create a dev container configuration .devcontainer/devcontainer.json.
Make sure you have Docker installed. If you use Windows, make sure your project is on a partition shared with Docker.

Dev Container configuration

{
    "name": "Your project Dev",
    "image": "mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/go:latest",
    "extensions": [
        "golang.go",
    ],
    "settings": {
        "go.useLanguageServer": true
    },
    "postCreateCommand": "go mod download",
}

It also runs go mod download after the container is set up to download your Go dependencies when the container is ready.

Using Go Commands

Verify the Go Installation go version
Initialize a Go module go mod init my_project_name

Make a main.go file in your folder and paste this code:

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    fmt.Println("Hello COMP423!")
}

Run your Go code go run main.go or build a binary go build -o myapp main.go Unlike go run, go build generates a reusable binary that can be executed multiple times or shared with others without needing recompilation, similar to how gcc compiles source code into an executable binary.

Launching it

Launch it by opening the VS Code command palette and selecting Remote-Containers: Open folder in container... and choose the current folder.

This will build the Docker image, install the VS Code dependencies in there, and bind mount everything for you!

Finally, you have a terminal running a beautiful zsh inside VS Code (open a terminal if you don’t see it).

Pushing to GitHub

Now you can commit and push these changes to github. Stage your changes and commit them, with an appropriate message, before pushing to your remote repository.

git add .
git commit -m "Created Go project"
git push origin main