Uninstalling a package installed with Go

Have you ever installed a package by using go install <some-package> and wondered how to uninstall it?

Go is really great in that respect. Go packages are a single binary and they’re installed based on how your Go tooling is set up.

Provided we have Go installed, when we run go help install in the command line, we can see where packages are installed:

usage: go install [build flags] [packages]

Install compiles and installs the packages named by the import paths.

Executables are installed in the directory named by the GOBIN environment variable, which defaults to $GOPATH/bin or $HOME/go/bin if the GOPATH environment variable is not set. Executables in $GOROOT are installed in $GOROOT/bin or $GOTOOLDIR instead of $GOBIN.

So that’s pretty straight-forward. Let’s see where our packages are installed by trying the first command:

echo $GOPATH

If that returns blank, it’s not defined, so we can probably assume they’re going to be installed in ~/go/bin.

ls $HOME/go/bin

This should return a list of executable binaries installed using go install.

Installing a package with Go

A while back, I built a really simple CLI tool to assist me with testing deep links and statically generated sites that I built. This CLI tool static-server allows me to serve the entire contents of a directory as a static website.

As the instructions in the README say, I can install the latest version of the tool using Go with the following command:

go install github.com/tinacious/static-server@latest

Then, I can navigate to any static HTML website folder on my computer and serve it. Let’s assume I have the following directory somewhere:

test
├── index.html
└── style.css

I can run the following:

cd path/to/test
static-server

This will serve the contents of the directory on a random port.

Uninstalling a package installed with Go

Let’s say you’ve tried this tool and you absolutely hate it. You prefer to type out the long Python 3 command, or use an NPM package that depends on you having the correct Node.js runtime on your computer. Here’s how you can uninstall static-server.