The Go plugin breaks if snapcraft.yaml is inside the Go project tree itself. Problem is this: $GOPATH is set to parts/myproject/go, source code is symlinked into parts/myproject/go/myproject pointing to the root of myproject. Root of myproject contains parts/myproject/go. That means there's an infinite recursion, and when the Go snapcraft plugin attempts to build go get -t -d ./myproject/... it explodes in all kinds of funny ways because it recursively finds the $GOPATH source code again as myproject/parts/myproject/go/src/myproject/parts/myproject/go/src/myproject/<ad infinitum>. Possible solutions: 1. Don't recursively symlink 2. Don't blindly build recusively, but rather ask to explicitly state what to build I would very much prefer 2, because otherwise we'll soon see other bugs being reported about people struggling with trying to build a small thing out of a big tree and being unable to because snapcraft blindly builds it all. Been there before in other contexts.