go-plate

Opinionated Go REST Backend Boilerplate. Using go 1.22.0.

As I've developed my Glassdoor clone Compared and a few other smaller apps, I've tinkered around with Go a bit. I've tried quite a few different project structures and techniques, experimenting to find what works best for me.

After all that trial and error, I decided to put together this Go backend boilerplate project. It is supposed to serve as a distillation of all the lessons I've learned and a starting point that incorporates the patterns and practices I've found to be most effective. Something that allows me (and maybe you) to spin up a new project fast and be productive.

Overview & Features

• Routing with chi (Lightweight, 100% compatible with net/http)
• Environment variable management using godotenv
• CORS handling with cors
• Containerization with Docker
• API versioning via URL paths (/api/v2/posts) and custom headers (X-API-Version: v1)
• Request payload validation using validator
• SQL (PostgreSQL) integration with gorm ORM
• Database schema management with migrate for version-controlled and reproducible migrations
• Redis caching implementation with go-redis
• Secure password hashing and verification
• Authentication middleware with session management (Redis-backed)
• Rate Limiting (Implemented Token Bucket & Sliding Window, both with in-memory storage for local rate limiting, and Redis for distributed systems across multiple server instances)
• CI/CD pipeline for GCP Cloud Run service
• CI/CD pipeline for AWS services
• Example endpoints to showcase functionality and use
• Documentation generation with Swagger

How to use

For local development, copy .env.example to .env with your variables or otherwise inject them. For docker, a sample docker-compose.yml is at the root with these variables.

At the root of the project is a Makefile with some util commands to help development.

Go commands

make dev -> go run with live reload thru air

make run -> go run

make build -> go build

Docker commands

make up -> Spins up docker container(s) with docker-compose

make down -> Spins down docker container(s) with docker-compose

make down -v -> Spins down docker container(s) and volume(s) with docker-compose

Migrations

Local

make migration name=<migration_name> -> Create a new migration

make migrate-up -> Runs up migrations

make migrate-down -> Runs down migrations

Docker

migrate-up-docker -> Runs up migrations

migrate-down-docker -> Runs down migrations