I am using VS Code as my IDE for Go and thought it would be worth sharing a tip I learnt about additional tools to include after the official Go extension from Google had been installed.

Bring up the command pallet (ctl + shift + p) and type:

go install/update tools

and you will be presented with the option to install a number of additional tools

Select the ones of interest or select them all, which I did.

Here is the output from VS Code showing the successful installation:

Tools environment: GOPATH=/home/go/go
Installing 7 tools at /home/go/go/bin in module mode.
  gotests
  gomodifytags
  impl
  goplay
  dlv
  staticcheck
  gopls

Installing github.com/cweill/gotests/gotests@v1.6.0 (/home/go/go/bin/gotests) SUCCEEDED
Installing github.com/fatih/gomodifytags@v1.16.0 (/home/go/go/bin/gomodifytags) SUCCEEDED
Installing github.com/josharian/impl@v1.1.0 (/home/go/go/bin/impl) SUCCEEDED
Installing github.com/haya14busa/goplay/cmd/goplay@v1.0.0 (/home/go/go/bin/goplay) SUCCEEDED
Installing github.com/go-delve/delve/cmd/dlv@latest (/home/go/go/bin/dlv) SUCCEEDED
Installing honnef.co/go/tools/cmd/staticcheck@latest (/home/go/go/bin/staticcheck) SUCCEEDED
Installing golang.org/x/tools/gopls@latest (/home/go/go/bin/gopls) SUCCEEDED

All tools successfully installed. You are ready to Go. 🙂

Problems

The extension has dependencies on several tools and if these are absent you will be prompted to download them. During the preparation of this post I ran into a problem whereby VS Code would report the following error when a Go file was opened:

Failed to run '/snap/bin/go env. The config change may not be applied correctly.

The resolution was to make a change to the VS Code JSON preferences file as described in this issue on GitHub. If you run into problems with this fix please let me know in the comments.