Written by Hector Rios
on October 10, 2021

gopls asdf

tl;dr

Ensure that your GOPATH has your asdf go env!

export GOROOT="$HOME/.asdf/installs/golang/1.17.go"
export GOPATH=$(go env GOPATH)
export PATH="$PATH:$(go env GOPATH)/bin"

Preface

I apologise if this is all over the place. I mainly spent the last two hours searching for a solution, and was able to conjure up a solution (detailed below). I’m primarily writing this for myself; please excuse any bouncing between ideas/concepts.

Background

I’ve been playing around with nvim for a bit of time now. I haven’t taken advantage of the native lsp protocol built into version 0.5+. I’ve been trying to write more go for personal projects, such as fauci.d, so my desire for LSP quickly spiked. For Go, the LSP server is gopls.

Getting nvim configured with gopls

This step is pretty easy. In your nvim config files, you configure the lsp plugin of your choice to use gopls. I’m using neovim/nvim-lspconfig plugin, so for me it looks like:

lua << EOF
local nvim_lsp = require('lspconfig')

local on_attach = function(client, bufnr)
  -- configuring the lspconfig plugin
end

-- this tells nvim lsp to register a new language server, named gopls, and use the configuration from above.
nvim_lsp.gopls.setup {
  on_attach = on_attach,
}
EOF

Once you save and reload your nvim, you should be good to go – but I wasn’t. I ran into the following issue when navigating into go files:

cmd ["gopls"] is not executable

This means that nvim cannot find an executable named gopls. You can check by running the following command in nvim: :echo executable('gopls'). If it returns a 1, then it is available and ready to be used. I kept getting 0, despite installing the binary manually.

TLDR, this turned out to be a problem because I never set my $GOPATH and $GOROOT environment variables. asdf allows you to install multiple versions of go, so I’m still a little unclear how to manage these. However, the following configuration in my .zshrc did the trick:

export GOROOT="$HOME/.asdf/installs/golang/1.17.go"
export GOPATH=$(go env GOPATH)
export PATH="$PATH:$(go env GOPATH)/bin"

Once this was set, I fired up nvim and loaded up a go file, only to have everything work.

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