📌 What is GOPATH?

In early versions of Go (before Go modules were introduced in Go 1.11 / made default in Go 1.16), the GOPATH environment variable defined the workspace directory where all your Go code, dependencies, and binaries lived.

It typically looked like this:

$GOPATH/
 ├── src/       # source code for your projects and dependencies
 ├── pkg/       # compiled package objects
 └── bin/       # compiled executables (from `go install`)

For example:

• If GOPATH=/home/maelton/go,
• Your project might live in: /home/maelton/go/src/github.com/maelton/myapp
• Installed binaries would go into: /home/maelton/go/bin

This structure was mandatory back then — you couldn’t just put your project anywhere.

📌 Why was it needed?

Because Go needed a deterministic way to:

• Find your project’s code
• Find and store dependencies
• Store compiled binaries

Without modules, the GOPATH was essentially the global "workspace root."

📌 What replaced it?

Since Go modules (go mod init, go.mod) became the default in Go 1.16 (2021), you no longer need to put code inside GOPATH.

With modules: