Plenty of the times our development server (or CI server) is not the same as our production server. For interpreted languages like Python or Ruby this is no problem . Java solves it by using the JVM.
In GO, however, binaries are built for a specific architecture, so if you build your binary on MacOS it will not work on a ubuntu. But after Go 1.5 cross-compilation became incredibly simple. You just need to set two env variables:
GOOS: The target OS (linux, darvin, ...)GOARCH: the architecture of the system (286, amd, amd64, ....)
With this, to compile your code to Ubuntu for instance you just need to call:
GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build -v
And done! You can safely deploy your binary to your server.
A full list of values for GOOS/GOARCH can be found here: