Go Cross Compilation from Windows to Linux/Ubuntu
I have GO 1.7 installed on my Windows 10. I created test program and it works perfectly in Windows. Next step is to try to run it on my docker virtual machine with Ubuntu.
Answer:
That other question is a bit old (from 2013).
Cross-platform support evolved a lot, all you need to do is change the environment variables (GOARCH
and GOOS
) and run go build
.
Navigate to the folder of the main
package, then:
set GOARCH=amd64
set GOOS=linux
go build
You may change the name of the result binary like this:
go build -o "myapp"
Note that in Linux to compile the app for Windows amd64, a single command is enough (in the folder of the main
package):
GOOS=windows GOARCH=amd64 go build
This is also confirmed in blog post: Dave Cheney: Cross compilation with Go 1.5:
To cross compile a Go program using Go 1.5 the process is as follows:
set
GOOS
andGOARCH
to be the values for the target operating system and architecture.run
go build -v YOURPACKAGE
Notes
You don't have to, and you shouldn't run go install
, as that will compile and install the packages in your GOPATH
, which is often not wanted. Doing cross compilation is not for developing / testing your app and packages. It is to produce a single binary which you will run on another system / computer.
go build
will not install anything, it will just produce the executable binary. For details, see What does go build build?
Also confirmed in blog post: Dave Cheney: Cross compilation with Go 1.5:
When cross compiling, you should use
go build
, notgo install
. This is the one of the few cases wherego build
is preferable togo install
.The reason for this is
go install
always caches compiled packages,.a
files, into thepkg/
directory that matches the root of the source code.