(I wrote this as a protip on Coderwall)

Compiling your go code into a binary is pretty simple:

$ go install <package>

This will build the binary for your current OS and architecture. But compiling binaries for other operating systems and even architectures is also possible. You just need to modify a few environment variables:

• GOARCH – the architecture, e.g. amd64, 386 or arm
• GOOS – the operating system – linux, darwin or windows

Building the compiler first …

You can take a look at the output of go env to see what your current configuration looks like. But to actually cross compile, you need to first build the compilers.

With Mac OS / Homebrew, just install go with --cross-compile-common or --cross-compile-all. See the recipe for details.

If you have installed Go from source, just set the variables and call ./all.bash in the src folder for each GOARCH/GOOS combination you need.

This guide might help if you are totally lost.

Building your project …

Back to our project. Similar to building the compiler you just need to modify the environment variables and call go build as before. Go will now create a subfolder in ./bin/ matching your os/arch combination. Here you will find your crosscompiled binary. Obvisouly you can also pass in the varis in one line:

$ GOARCH=arm GOOS=linux go build helloworld

PS: If you want to crosscompile for ARM v5/v6 CPU (e.g. for the raspberry pi), you need to set GOARM=5 to use different set of operations for floating point math.