gopls, the Go language servergopls (pronounced “Go please”) is the official Go language server developed by the Go team. It provides IDE features to any LSP-compatible editor.
You should not need to interact with gopls directly--it will be automatically integrated into your editor. The specific features and settings vary slightly by editor, so we recommend that you proceed to the documentation for your editor below.
To get started with gopls, install an LSP plugin in your editor of choice.
If you use gopls with an editor that is not on this list, please let us know by filing an issue or modifying this documentation.
For the most part, you should not need to install or update gopls. Your editor should handle that step for you.
If you do want to get the latest stable version of gopls, change to any directory that is both outside of your GOPATH and outside of a module (a temp directory is fine), and run:
go install golang.org/x/tools/gopls@latest
Learn more in the advanced installation instructions.
gopls supports both Go module and GOPATH modes, but if you are working with multiple modules or uncommon project layouts, you will need to specifically configure your workspace. See the Workspace document for information on supported workspace layouts.
You can configure gopls to change your editor experience or view additional debugging information. Configuration options will be made available by your editor, so see your editor's instructions for specific details. A full list of gopls settings can be found in the Settings documentation.
gopls inherits your editor's environment, so be aware of any environment variables you configure. Some editors, such as VS Code, allow users to selectively override the values of some environment variables.
If you are having issues with gopls, please follow the steps described in the troubleshooting guide.
gopls follows the Go Release Policy, meaning that it officially supports the last 2 major Go releases. Per issue #39146, we attempt to maintain best-effort support for the last 4 major Go releases, but this support extends only to not breaking the build and avoiding easily fixable regressions.
In the context of this discussion, gopls “supports” a Go version if it supports being built with that Go version as well as integrating with the go command of that Go version.
The following table shows the final gopls version that supports a given Go version. Go releases more recent than any in the table can be used with any version of gopls.
| Go Version | Final gopls version with support (without warnings) |
|---|---|
| Go 1.12 | gopls@v0.7.5 |
| Go 1.15 | gopls@v0.9.5 |
Our extended support is enforced via continuous integration with older Go versions. This legacy Go CI may not block releases: test failures may be skipped rather than fixed. Furthermore, if a regression in an older Go version causes irreconcilable CI failures, we may drop support for that Go version in CI if it is 3 or 4 Go versions old.
gopls currently only supports the go command, so if you are using a different build system, gopls will not work well. Bazel is not officially supported, but Bazel support is in development (see bazelbuild/rules_go#512). You can follow these instructions to configure your gopls to work with Bazel.