Published on 2025-02-18

Tip of the day #5: Install Go tools with a specific version

I had an issue with Go tools around versioning, and here's how I solved it. It could be useful to others. This was the error:

$ staticcheck  ./...
-: module requires at least go1.23.6, but Staticcheck was built with go1.23.1 (compile)
$ go version
go version go1.23.6 linux/amd64

Indeed the project was specifying go 1.23.6 in go.mod.

Even after removing the staticcheck binary and re-installing it I still had the same issue:

$ which staticcheck
/home/pg/go/bin/staticcheck
$ rm /home/pg/go/bin/staticcheck
$ which staticcheck
which: no staticcheck 
$ go install honnef.co/go/tools/cmd/staticcheck@v0.5.1
$ staticcheck  ./...
-: module requires at least go1.23.6, but Staticcheck was built with go1.23.1 (compile)

I even tried the -a flag for go install to force a clean build (since go install fetches the sources and builds them) to no avail.

Solution: following https://go.dev/doc/manage-install, I installed the specific version of Go I needed and used that to install the tool:

$ go install golang.org/dl/go1.23.6@latest
$ go1.23.6 download
$ go1.23.6 install honnef.co/go/tools/cmd/staticcheck@v0.5.1
$ staticcheck  -tags=integration_tests ./... # Works!

That was a TIL for me.

Note that Go 1.24 supports the project listing tools directly in go.mod which would probably solve this issue directly.

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