Building a custom fork of Go

Note

For your reference, here is the relevant offical document: Installing Go from source.

Lantern requires a custom fork of Go, which doesn’t provide pre-built binary files, so we’ll have to compile it by ourselves.

Install Go compiler binaries

The Go tool chain is written in Go. To build it, you need a Go compiler installed.

1. Launch a MinGW64 shell, which you can find at C:\msys64\mingw64.exe, if you haven’t yet.

2. Change the current directory to your home directory:

   cd $HOME
   

3. According to the offical document, you can use a binary release as a bootstrap tool chain, see the downloads page. However, the link seems to be blocked, so let’s build the bootstrap tool chain from source instead.

   1. First, download the source by:

      wget https://storage.googleapis.com/golang/go1.4-bootstrap-20170531.tar.gz
      

      And a compressed file of 10.79 MB will be downloaded.

      Note

      If the download fails, try the following command:

      wget http://ulantern.readthedocs.io/en/latest/_downloads/go1.4-bootstrap-20170531.tar.gz
      

   2. Next, unpack it. This is going to take several seconds:

      mkdir Go1.4/ && tar -zxvf go1.4-bootstrap-20170531.tar.gz -C Go1.4/ --strip-components=1
      

   3. Finally, cd to the src subdirectory and run make.bat. This would take a while:

      cd Go1.4/src/
      ./make.bat
      

4. Now it’s return to the home directory:

   cd $HOME
   

5. (Optional) Now you can delete the compressed file, if you want:

   rm go1.4-bootstrap-20170531.tar.gz
   

Fetch the Go repository

1. Create a directory named Lantern. It will be containing the repository (i.e. source code) of Go and Lantern:

   mkdir Lantern
   

2. Change directory to Lantern:

   cd Lantern
   

3. Download the custom fork of Go from Github:

   git clone https://github.com/getlantern/go.git
   cd go
   git checkout lantern
   

   Note

   When you see a multi-line line code block, run the command on each line one aftr one.

Install Go

1. Build the Go distribution:

   cd src
   ./all.bat
   

   all.bat would also run some tests after building Go. If you wish to skip the tests, run the following commands instead:

   cd src
   ./make.bat
   

2. Then, add the bin directory to $PATH:

   echo "# getlantern/go" >> ~/.bashrc
   echo "export GOROOT=$HOME/Lantern/go" >> ~/.bashrc
   echo "export PATH=$PATH:$GOROOT/bin" >> ~/.bashrc
   source ~/.bashrc
   

3. Go to the final step, Building Lantern.