There are many reasons why one wants to use the latest Go, but with the upcoming 1.8 it is especially nice as it finally seems to feasible to expose Go based HTTPS servers directly without putting another HTTP server (like Nginx) in front.

Or as Cloudflare put it in their So you want to expose Go on the Internet blog entry:

Back when crypto/tls was slow and net/http young, the general wisdom was to always put Go servers behind a reverse proxy like NGINX. That’s not necessary anymore!

As the current Ubuntu 16.04 LTS only has Go 1.6 available in the repos, I created a PPA which has the various bits and pieces backported from next Ubuntu to provide Go 1.8 on Ubuntu 16.04 now.

You can update your system from my Golang backports PPA by adding ppa:longsleep/golang-backports to your system’s Software Sources.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:longsleep/golang-backports
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install golang-go

See https://launchpad.net/~longsleep/+archive/ubuntu/golang-backports for the list of packages.

Adding this PPA will update the default system Go to 1.8. Please note that Go 1.8 is still in beta at time of writing.

Have fun!