Go mandates code to be organized on the filesystem in a certain way—the organization has to be at the highest level in terms of a workspace. While there are general recommendations to have one workspace for all projects, in practical situations, I have found it much more scalable to have one workspace per project; for example, consider the situation of two projects using a common dependency, with a different version (more on that in the next section, third-party dependencies.

Here is the recommended high-level structure for the code:

• bin: This directory contains the executables; that is, the output of the compiler.
• pkg: This folder is for the package objects.
• <package>: A folder for each of the top-level packages that make the components of the project.
• vendor: This folder hosts third-party dependencies. There will be more on this in the following section, third-party libraries.
• Makefile: This makes it easier to organize various tasks such as compilation, linting, tests, and also stage code. This again is described in more detail in the next section, third- party libraries.
• scripts: Various scripts including DB provisioning/migrations.
• Main driver: The main file(s) that drive the components and control the life cycle of top-level objects.

This is how a typical Golang workspace looks:

├── Makefile
├── README.md
├── api
├── bin
├── db
├── lib
├── scheduler
├── scrapper.go
├── tests
└── vendor
├── pkg
└── src
   ├── github.com
   │   ├── fatih
   │   │   └── structs
   │   ├── influxdata
   │   │   └── influxdb
   │   ├── jasonlvhit
   │   │   └── gocron
   │   ├── magiconair
   │   │   └── properties
   │   ├── mattn
   │   │   └── go-isatty
   │   ├── mitchellh
   │   │   └── mapstructure
   │   ├── olivere
   │   │   └── elastic
   │   ├── pkg
   │   │   └── errors
   │   ├── sirupsen
   │   │   └── logrus
   │   ├── spf13
   │   │   ├── afero
   │   │   ├── cast
   │   │   ├── jwalterweatherman
   │   │   ├── pflag
   │   │   └── viper
   │   ├── uber-go
   │   │   └── atomic

The GOPATH environment variable specifies the location of your workspace. It defaults to a directory named go inside your home directory. If you would like to work in a different location, you will need to set GOPATH to the path to that directory with a fallback to the Go home directory. The following section shows you how to do this in detail.