Advanced topics

This documentation is for advanced gopls users, who may want to test unreleased versions or try out special features.

Installing unreleased versions

To get a specific version of gopls (for example, to test a prerelease version), run:

GO111MODULE=on go install golang.org/x/tools/gopls@vX.Y.Z

Where vX.Y.Z is the desired version.

Unstable versions

To update gopls to the latest unstable version, use the following commands.

# Create an empty go.mod file, only for tracking requirements.
cd $(mktemp -d)
go mod init gopls-unstable

# Use 'go get' to add requirements and to ensure they work together.
go get -d golang.org/x/tools/gopls@master golang.org/x/tools@master

go install golang.org/x/tools/gopls

Working on the Go source distribution

If you are working on the Go project itself, the go command that gopls invokes will have to correspond to the version of the source you are working on. That is, if you have checked out the Go project to $HOME/go, your go command should be the $HOME/go/bin/go executable that you built with make.bash or equivalent.

You can achieve this by adding the right version of go to your PATH (export PATH=$HOME/go/bin:$PATH on Unix systems) or by configuring your editor.

To work on both std and cmd simultaneously, add a go.work file to GOROOT/src:

cd $(go env GOROOT)/src
go work init . cmd

Note that you must work inside the GOROOT/src subdirectory, as the go command does not recognize go.work files in a parent of GOROOT/src (https://go.dev/issue/59429).

Working with generic code

Gopls has support for editing generic Go code. To enable this support, you need to install gopls using Go 1.18 or later. The easiest way to do this is by installing Go 1.18+ and then using this Go version to install gopls:

$ go install golang.org/x/tools/gopls@latest

It is strongly recommended that you install the latest version of gopls, or the latest unstable version as described above.

The gopls built with these instructions understands generic code. See the generics tutorial for more information on how to use generics in Go!

Known issues