Golang linter issues 'context loading failed: no go files to analyze'

We are using

golangci-lint version 1.40.1 together with
golang version 1.16.4

in our project for linting our Golang code.

Until now, what we did is running this bash script (from the root directory of our repository):

if ! [ -x "$(command -v golangci-lint)" ]; then
    echo "Fetching linter..."
    go install github.com/golangci/golangci-lint/cmd/golangci-lint
    go mod tidy
fi

golangci-lint run --build-tags="unit contract container"

With some recent updates of Golang and golangci-lint, we suddenly face this error message:

ERRO Running error: context loading failed: no go files to analyze

There is a lengthy post on GitHub regarding this issue but the only useful suggestion there is to turn off the GO111MODULE env variable. When I run the linter with GO111MODULE turned off like

GO111MODULE=off golangci-lint run --build-tags="unit contract container"

the upper error message disappears but instead I am getting lots of false linting errors like:

api/router.go:152:5: undeclared name: `PermissionUpdatePackage` (typecheck)
                                PermissionUpdatePackage,
                                ^

My go environment looks like this:

GO111MODULE=on
GOPATH=/Users/USER/workspace/go
GOROOT=/usr/local/opt/go/libexec
GOPRIVATE=*.CUSTOMER.com
GOSS_PATH=/usr/local/bin/goss

I tried to install the linter via go get... as well as go install ... and finally brew install golangci-lint which seems to be the recommended way following this documentation.

Solution

Running a go get ./... in the root of the project eventually solved the issues. In between we ran the following commands that probably cleared some (module?) caches that might have caused trouble as well:

golangci-lint cache clean && go clean -modcache -cache -i
golangci-lint run -v --timeout=5s

The error message

ERRO Running error: context loading failed: failed to load packages: timed out to load packages: context deadline exceeded

in the latter command pointed us to this GitHub post that made me try out go get ./...

For installing the linter (with a specified version), we ended up with this script:

linter_version='1.40.1'
if ! [ -x "$(command -v golangci-lint)" ]; then
    echo "Fetching linter..."
    # we cannot install linter in the project directory, otherwise we get dependency errors
    # hence, temporarily jump into the /tmp directory
    pushd /tmp > /dev/null
    GO111MODULE=on go get github.com/golangci/golangci-lint/cmd/golangci-lint@v"${linter_version}" 2>&1
    popd >/dev/null
fi