I"m trying to contribute for a project and the docs tell me to use this command
go get github.com/foo/bar
but the error is
can't load package: package github.com/foo/bar: no Go files in /home/f/go/src/github.com/foo/bar
Obviously its looking on my computer but how do I make it so that it downloads from the web?
The problem is that the project you're trying to download cannot be built, because Go can't find any source files to build at the source path github.com/foo/bar. The package is, however, downloaded, and if you look in $GOPATH/src/github.com/foo/bar you will see the repository cloned there. So if you want just that, then you're done, but you can use go get -d in the future to avoid the error message.
If you want something specific that can be imported, e.g. github.com/foo/bar/somepackage, then you should use go get github.com/foo/bar/somepackage.