Cleaner, Better, Faster
I've never really known what to do with my personal site. Over the years it's been a dumping ground for links to different projects, and played host to various half-hearted attempts at blogging. But...
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Serving Static Sites with Go
I've recently moved the site you're reading right now from a Sinatra/Ruby application to an (almost) static site served by Go. So while it's fresh in my head, here's an explanation of principles...
View ArticleAn Introduction to Handlers and Servemuxes in Go
Processing HTTP requests with Go is primarily about two things: handlers and servemuxes. If you’re coming from an MVC-background, you can think of handlers as being a bit like controllers. Generally...
View ArticleGolang Automatic Reloads
I wrote a short Bash script to automatically reload Go programs. The script acts as a light wrapper around go run, stopping and restarting it whenever a .go file in your current directory or...
View ArticleUnderstanding Mutexes
For anyone new to building web applications with Go, it's important to realise that all incoming HTTP requests are served in their own Goroutine. This means that any code in or called by your...
View ArticleHTTP Response Snippets for Go
Taking inspiration from the Rails layouts and rendering guide, I thought it'd be a nice idea to build a snippet collection illustrating some common HTTP responses for Go web applications. Sending...
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Form Validation and Processing in Go
In this post I want to outline a sensible pattern that you can use for validating and processing HTML forms in Go web applications. Over the years I've tried out a number of different approaches, but...
View ArticleSimple Flash Messages in Go
Often in web applications you need to temporarily store data in-between requests, such as an error or success message during the Post-Redirect-Get process for a form submission. Frameworks such as...
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Making and Using HTTP Middleware
When you're building a web application there's probably some shared functionality that you want to run for many (or even all) HTTP requests. You might want to log every request, gzip every response,...
View ArticleContext-Aware Handler Chains in Go (using Stack)
I've written a package for chaining context-aware handlers in Go, called Stack. It was heavily inspired by Alice. What do you mean by 'context-aware'? If you're using a middleware pattern to process...
View ArticlePractical Persistence in Go: SQL Databases
This is the first in a series of tutorials about persisting data in Go web applications. In this post we'll be looking at SQL databases. I'll explain the basics of the database/sql package, walk...
View ArticleOrganising Database Access in Go
A few weeks ago someone created a thread on Reddit asking: In the context of a web application what would you consider a Go best practice for accessing the database in (HTTP or other) handlers? The...
View ArticleWorking with Redis
In this post I'm going to be looking at using Redis as a data persistence layer for a Go application. We'll start by explaining a few of the essential concepts, and then build a working web...
View ArticleSCS: A session manager for Go 1.7+
I’ve just released SCS, a session management package for Go 1.7+. Its design leverages Go’s new context package to automatically load and save session data via middleware. Importantly, it also...
View ArticleValidation Snippets for Go
Over the past few years I've built up a collection of snippets for validating inputs in Go. There's nothing new or groundbreaking here, but hopefully they might save you some time. The snippets assume...
View ArticleHow to Rate Limit HTTP Requests
If you're running a HTTP server and want to rate limit user requests, the go-to package to use is probably Tollbooth by Didip Kerabat. It's well maintained, has a good range of features and a clean...
View ArticleConfiguring sql.DB for Better Performance
There are a lot of good tutorials which talk about Go's sql.DB type and how to use it to execute SQL database queries and statements. But most of them gloss over the SetMaxOpenConns(),...
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How to Disable http.FileServer Directory Listings
A nice feature of Go's http.FileServer is that it automatically generates navigable directory listings, which look a bit like this: But for certain applications you might want to prevent this behavior...
View ArticleHow to build a Serverless API with Go and AWS Lambda
Earlier this year AWS announced that their Lambda service would now be providing first-class support for the Go language, which is a great step forward for any gophers (like myself) who fancy...
View ArticleHTTP Method Spoofing in Go
A.K.A. HTTP method overriding. As a web developer you probably already know that HTML forms only support the GET and POST HTTP methods. If you want to send a PUT, PATCH or DELETE request you need to...
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Streamline Your Sublime Text + Go Workflow
For the past couple of years I've used Sublime Text as my primary code editor, along with the GoSublime plugin to provide some extra IDE-like features. But I've recently swapped GoSublime for a more...
View ArticleHow to Hash and Verify Passwords With Argon2 in Go
Thanks to Andreas Auernhammer, author of the golang.org/x/crypto/argon2 package, for checking over this post before publication. If you're planning to store user passwords it's good practice...
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An Overview of Go's Tooling
Occasionally I get asked “why do you like using Go?” And one of the things I often mention is the thoughtful tooling that exists alongside the language as part of the go command. There are some tools...
View ArticleUsing PostgreSQL JSONB with Go
PostgreSQL provides two JSON-related data types that you can use — JSON and JSONB. The principal differences are: JSON stores an exact copy of the JSON input. JSONB stores a binary representation of...
View ArticleGolang Interfaces Explained
For the past few months I've been running a survey which asks people what they're finding difficult about learning Go. And something that keeps coming up in the responses is the concept of interfaces....
View ArticleHow to Parse a JSON Request Body in Go
Let's say that you're building a JSON API with Go. And in some of the handlers — probably as part of a POST or PUT request — you want to read a JSON object from the request body and assign it to a...
View ArticleHow to Manage Database Timeouts and Cancellations in Go
One of the great features of Go's database/sql package is that it's possible to cancel database queries while they are still running via a context.Context instance. On the face of it, usage of this...
View ArticleSurprises and Gotchas When Working With JSON
This is a list of things about Go's encoding/json package which, over the years, have either confused or surprised me when I first encountered them. Many of these things are mentioned in the official...
View ArticleCustom command-line flags with flag.Func
One of my favorite things about the recent Go 1.16 release is a small — but very welcome — addition to the flag package: the flag.Func() function. This makes it much easier to define and use custom...
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How to correctly use Basic Authentication in Go
When searching for examples of HTTP basic authentication with Go, every result I could find unfortunately contained code which is either out-of-date (i.e. doesn't use the r.BasicAuth() functionality...
View ArticleI18n in Go: Managing Translations
Recently I've been building a fully internationalized (i18n) and localized (l10n) web application for the first time with Go's golang.org/x/text packages. I've found that the packages and tools that...
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Which Go router should I use? (with flowchart)
When you start to build web applications with Go, one of the first questions you'll probably ask is "which router should I use?". It's not an easy question to answer, either. There are probably more...
View ArticleQuick tip: Change URL query params in Go
In this short post we're going to discuss how to add, modify or delete URL query string parameters in Go. To illustrate, we'll look at how to change this URL:...
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Continuous integration with Go and GitHub Actions
In this post we're going to walk through how to use GitHub Actions to create a continuous integration (CI) pipeline that automatically tests, vets and lints your Go code. For solo projects I usually...
View ArticleQuick tip: Easy test assertions with Go generics
Now that Go 1.18 has been released with support for generics, it's easier than ever to create helper functions for your test assertions. Using helpers for your test assertions can help to: Make your...
View ArticleHow to use go run to manage tool dependencies
When you're working on a project it's common for there to be some developer tooling dependencies. These aren't code dependencies, but rather tools that you run as part of the development, testing,...
View ArticleFlow: A delightfully tiny but powerful HTTP router for Go
Last year I wrote a new HTTP router for Go called Flow. I've been using it in production on this site and in a couple of other projects since, and I'm pretty happy with how it's working out so decided...
View ArticleThe ‘fat service’ pattern for Go web applications
In this post I'd like to talk about one of my favorite architectural patterns for building web applications and APIs in Go. It's kind of a mix between the service object and fat model patterns — so I...
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A complete guide to working with Cookies in Go
In this post we're going to run through how to use cookies in your Go web application to persist data between HTTP requests for a specific client. We'll start simple, and slowly build up a working...
View ArticleAn introduction to Packages, Imports and Modules in Go
This tutorial is written for anyone who is new to Go. In it we'll explain what packages, import statements and modules are in Go, how they work and relate to each other and — hopefully — clear up any...
View ArticleHow to use the http.ResponseController type
One of my favorite things about the recent Go 1.20 release is the new http.ResponseController type, which brings with it three nice benefits: You can now override your server-wide read and write...
View ArticleQuick tip: A time-saving Makefile for your Go projects
Whenever I start a new Go project, one of the first things I do is create a Makefile in the root of my project directory. This Makefile serves two purposes. The first is to automate common admin tasks...
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Demystifying function parameters in Go
In this post we're going to talk about how (and why!) different types of function parameters behave differently in Go. If you're new (or even not-so-new) to Go, this can be a common source of...
View ArticleQuick tip: Implementing an in-memory cache in Go
In almost all web applications that I build, I end up needing to persist some data – either for a short period of time (such as caching the result of an expensive database query), or for the lifetime...
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