Reliability of storage.googleapis.com for Go downloads

[Mauri de Souza Meneguzzo]

Hi all,

I'd like to ask about the current reliability and intended support status of the storage.googleapis.com/golang download source.

Historically, many scripts and CI workflows have pulled Go releases directly from this source and continue in doing so today.

However, for years the official Go website (go.dev/dl) downloads from dl.google.com/go.

While testing CI automation recently, I noticed that some newer versions (for example, go1.24.9) are missing from the GCS bucket and return a 403 error, while the same version downloads correctly from dl.google.com. I recall experiencing similar issues in the past.

https://storage.googleapis.com/golang/go1.24.9.linux-amd64.tar.gz
https://dl.google.com/go/go1.24.9.linux-amd64.tar.gz

That raises a few questions:

1. Is storage.googleapis.com/golang still expected to stay in sync with official releases?

2. Should all automated scripts and CI pipelines migrate to using dl.google.com/go (or go.dev/dl) as the canonical source going forward?

3. Is there any long-term plan for deprecating the GCS bucket, or will it continue as a public mirror?

Understanding the intended support policy would help clarify best practices for CI environments and installers that currently depend on storage.googleapis.com/golang.

Thanks in advance for any clarification!

Mauri

[peterGo]

Mauri,

The official Go release announcements:   

https://groups.google.com/g/golang-announce   

Which say:

You can download binary and source distributions from the Go website:    
https://go.dev/dl/    

peter

[Brian Candler]

A 403 error doesn't mean the file is missing, it's a permission error. Can you capture the body of the HTTP response? It may tell you more. Are you going through a proxy perhaps?

For me, the URL you gave works fine:

% wget https://storage.googleapis.com/golang/go1.24.9.linux-amd64.tar.gz
--2025-10-18 08:26:05--  https://storage.googleapis.com/golang/go1.24.9.linux-amd64.tar.gz
Resolving storage.googleapis.com (storage.googleapis.com)... 2a00:1450:4009:c15::cf, 2a00:1450:4009:c08::cf, 2a00:1450:4009:c04::cf, ...
Connecting to storage.googleapis.com (storage.googleapis.com)|2a00:1450:4009:c15::cf|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 78693175 (75M) [application/x-gzip]
Saving to: ‘go1.24.9.linux-amd64.tar.gz’

go1.24.9.linux-amd64.tar.gz           100%[========================================================================>]  75.05M  26.3MB/s    in 2.9s

2025-10-18 08:26:08 (26.3 MB/s) - ‘go1.24.9.linux-amd64.tar.gz’ saved [78693175/78693175]