Where is a good location for $GOPATH?

Question

I'm working on a project in Go, which requires several external libraries, like a MySQL driver, an image manipulation library, etc. Right now, I have $GOPATH set to /usr/lib/go/src, which puts any downloaded packages in /usr/lib/go/src/src, which obviously doesn't seem right. If I set $GOPATH to /usr/lib/go, I get an error saying that $GOPATH can't be set to the same directory as $GOROOT. So should I put GOPATH=/path/to/my/project/lib in my build.sh, and when I commit to my git repo, put lib/ in my .gitignore?

I realize this is probably a silly question. It works fine as it is now, I'm just wondering if this is bad practice.

Answer 1

$GOPATH can really be any location you choose (with a few exceptions), so long as the compiler knows where to find it. If you change it just make sure you update the path with

export GOPATH=/path/to/gopath

My personal preference is to keep the $GOPATH separate from my code unless I'm writing a package which is meant to be imported via go get <repo path>, in which case I'll write the code in

$GOPATH/src/<repo path>

which is the standard location that the package gets stored when you use go get <repo path>