At Globality[1], we use microcosm [2], an internally built framework for crafting applications. We have 45+ microservices, all built on top of it, and it's a joy.
I was looking for a framework that will give me similar benefits with Golang. Something that I can take out of the box with some convention-over-configuration.
I found micro [3] and gizmo [4]. (There are more)
It seems to me that a full-blown web app doesn't come very natural to Golang yet. There isn't a framework that will give you what you are used for from other languages/frameworks.
I have a lot of experience with Golang and built many tools, and it always felt more natural to me when there is no database/models involved.
For APIs, I've used net/http and httprouter with great success. I've recently discovered Buffalo (https://github.com/gobuffalo/buffalo) which looks great for full-stack development but I have not used it for a production app.
I use it as a RESTful API for a single page app. I use some extra packages beyond those that come standard, but they don't really have a huge day-to-day impact on the code that I write.
Gorilla will probably make your life easier. I rely on the mux package quite a bit for routing purposes.
I also use Google's jsonapi package to maintain a semblance of orderliness when it comes to request and response data, but I wouldn't be hurting too much without it.
If you are creating an SPA application and you just need an API in Go, the standard library or one of the microframeworks like Gin work fine. If you are doing full-stack development, you'll be more productive with a framework even though the Go community tends to shy away from large frameworks. If I were to use Go for a web app today, I'd use Buffalo which is relatively Rails-like while still being very modular: https://gobuffalo.io/
I've started using Echo[1] and it seems to provide most of what I'm looking for (routing, context, sessions, CSRF protection, form/json binding, etc). For templating, I'm using QuickTemplate[2] which creates statically generated templates, but Pongo2[3] and Jet[4] also look reasonable. sqlx[5], gorm[6], and sqlboiler[7] all seem reasonable for database access, depending on what your style is (sqlx being oriented toward manual statements, gorm being reflection-based orm-ish, and sqlboiler using go generate's code generation to make statically generated access for you).
If you don't want to piece things together yourself (and want a more Rails-like experience), Buffalo[8] is probably your best bet.
Sweet! Buffalo looks really interesting. I was playing with Sails the other day, which is a Rails-like framework for nodejs, I will try Buffalo and try to compare the experience. Would you recommend Buffalo for a JSON Web API mobile backend project or would it be an overkill?
Even though I know they're well-designed, I find Go's web templates hard to work in. So I avoid them.
My stack is basically:
- Postgres, using pq and sqlx
- A codegen ORM I wrote that scrapes schemas and generates CRUD and lookup functions for all my database types. I don't think dynamic ORMs like gorm are the way to go for Go.
- A session library I wrote a year ago, and simple Go wrapper handlers to require sessions, enforce authentication, &c, passing things like "current user" and "current session" down to standard net/http Handlers through Context.
- 10-or-so JSON utility functions I take with me from project to project.
- React, via create-react-app, so I all my templating is done in JSX.
No, but (1) sqlboiler is a much better ORM, and (2) it is surprisingly easy to build these things yourself; mine's just a bunch of text/template templates and ~100 lines of Go code to scrape a Postgres schema.
(I mean: this code will be open sourced pretty soon, since it's part of a bigger open source thingy I'm releasing, but the ORM isn't very good, just as good as I needed it to be; nobody should ever use it for another project.)
It walks you through pulling in different libraries (Gorilla Mux, GORM, etc), gluing them together, and structuring your code in a maintainable way.
A couple of other folks have mentioned Buffalo. It's a great ecosystem for building applications quickly, but I would strongly urge you to go through gluing the packages together yourself first to really understand what is going on underneath the magic.
I've used Echo in the past along with sqlx and Gorm.
I've found myself enjoying rolling/being more explicit about what it is that I need, so I now build out small web APIs just using a combination of Gorilla Mux + net/http.
Also check out Træfik. A fast reverse proxy. With support for kubernetes, prometheus, let's encrypt, grpc, websockets and more. It may change the way you design your web backend ;)
Am also looking forward to trying the new GoLand IDE from the JetBrains team. Currently using Atom but would be interested in dedicated integrations with gcloud sdk.
Plain Go, no frameworks (may be a little Gorilla toolkit components such as their mux), Postgres with sqlx and React on the front end. I describe it in detail here:
Just took a look at Chi's RESTful API example, I like it. I also like the benchmarks. Judging by most of the comments on this thread, it looks like the community favors modular small tools over big fat frameworks, is that true?
We rolled our own, nice benefit is everything registers events with the same logging subsystem and lets us define central hooks for common things like errors (to send to reporters).
Gin/React. I was using templates but decided to offload some display logic on the frontend instead of creating more API endpoints. So I switched to React. I dig writing decoupled front/backends
Currently? I run them on separate ports and use axios[0] to make requests against Buffalo routes. I had to use the github.com/rs/cors[1] package with Buffalo for CORS so that Vue doesn't yell at me. So I run `buffalo dev` in one tmux pane and `yarn dev` in another.
46 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadAt Globality[1], we use microcosm [2], an internally built framework for crafting applications. We have 45+ microservices, all built on top of it, and it's a joy.
I was looking for a framework that will give me similar benefits with Golang. Something that I can take out of the box with some convention-over-configuration.
I found micro [3] and gizmo [4]. (There are more)
It seems to me that a full-blown web app doesn't come very natural to Golang yet. There isn't a framework that will give you what you are used for from other languages/frameworks.
I have a lot of experience with Golang and built many tools, and it always felt more natural to me when there is no database/models involved.
[1] https://www.globality.com/en-us/
[2] https://github.com/globality-corp/?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=microcos...
[3] https://github.com/micro/go-micro
[4] https://github.com/NYTimes/gizmo
Gorilla will probably make your life easier. I rely on the mux package quite a bit for routing purposes.
I also use Google's jsonapi package to maintain a semblance of orderliness when it comes to request and response data, but I wouldn't be hurting too much without it.
If you don't want to piece things together yourself (and want a more Rails-like experience), Buffalo[8] is probably your best bet.
[1] https://echo.labstack.com/
[2] https://github.com/valyala/quicktemplate
[3] https://github.com/flosch/pongo2
[4] https://github.com/CloudyKit/jet
[5] https://github.com/jmoiron/sqlx
[6] https://github.com/jinzhu/gorm
[7] https://github.com/volatiletech/sqlboiler
[8] https://github.com/gobuffalo/buffalo
And I also use "bindata" to compile all my static files into the final binary [10].
[9] https://github.com/tockins/realize
[10] https://github.com/jteeuwen/go-bindata
My stack is basically:
- Postgres, using pq and sqlx
- A codegen ORM I wrote that scrapes schemas and generates CRUD and lookup functions for all my database types. I don't think dynamic ORMs like gorm are the way to go for Go.
- A session library I wrote a year ago, and simple Go wrapper handlers to require sessions, enforce authentication, &c, passing things like "current user" and "current session" down to standard net/http Handlers through Context.
- 10-or-so JSON utility functions I take with me from project to project.
- React, via create-react-app, so I all my templating is done in JSX.
- net/http/httptest for testing.
(I mean: this code will be open sourced pretty soon, since it's part of a bigger open source thingy I'm releasing, but the ORM isn't very good, just as good as I needed it to be; nobody should ever use it for another project.)
Piecing together libraries can absolutely be daunting, but once you get a starter app built your productivity will go way, way up.
I'd really recommend this (paid) course at https://www.usegolang.com
It walks you through pulling in different libraries (Gorilla Mux, GORM, etc), gluing them together, and structuring your code in a maintainable way.
A couple of other folks have mentioned Buffalo. It's a great ecosystem for building applications quickly, but I would strongly urge you to go through gluing the packages together yourself first to really understand what is going on underneath the magic.
I've found myself enjoying rolling/being more explicit about what it is that I need, so I now build out small web APIs just using a combination of Gorilla Mux + net/http.
DB: - dynamodb/psql depending on features. aws-sdk or base go sql package. - redis for caching. go-redis package.
Stats/logging: - statsd/graphite/grafana - sirupsen/logrus for logging
I usually write a wrapper for packages that will automatically report stats + logging.
https://traefik.io/
Am also looking forward to trying the new GoLand IDE from the JetBrains team. Currently using Atom but would be interested in dedicated integrations with gcloud sdk.
https://www.jetbrains.com/go/
https://grisha.org/blog/2017/04/27/simplistic-go-web-app/
* https://github.com/go-chi/chi is pretty good. I have a need for a lot of custom middlewares, so I need something more fleshed out than net/http.
* All config files are written in TOML: https://github.com/BurntSushi/toml
* https://github.com/gocql/gocql for all Cassandra needs.
* Development work is done in Docker so everyone has a consistent env.
That's all, I tend to dislike overarching frameworks. Smaller libraries work better for me.
Big framework comes at big cost when trying to upgrade to a new version because it’s surface area is big.
Web: https://github.com/blendlabs/go-web
DB: https://github.com/blendlabs/spiffy
Migrations: https://github.com/blendlabs/spiffy/migration
Logger: https://github.com/blendlabs/go-logger
CRON: https://github.com/blendlabs/go-chronometer
Android uses grpc-java iOS uses grpc-objc Browser uses gRPC-Gateway and the JSON equivalent of the protobuf3 spec.
At my day job I use the standard library.
Here is what the inside of the <script> portion of a component may look like: https://gist.github.com/howdoicomputer/cdadba6e47021ba90b7f7...
And here is the code for adding cors to Buffalo: https://gist.github.com/howdoicomputer/17366df6cd7b8208a22a8... I got that from a PR for pre-app handlers. [2]
Eventually, I'll hook everything up to Nginx for deployment.
[0] https://github.com/axios/axios [1] https://github.com/rs/cors [2] https://github.com/gobuffalo/buffalo/issues/609