Go Api

Golang First API #

I have been following Golang for a little bit. It seemed interesting to me for a few reasons. One major one was the speed of it. Another was it’s syntax is similar to python. I am no python developer, but I have made a few side project with it. SO I decided to update and an aging Rails application. It’s just a simple crud application that displays martial arts rings at tournaments. While I could write the entire website with Go I opted in to make an api. The reason is I want to make a React site and mobile apps made with React Native. It’s a pretty simple rest API that needed to connect to a database. I used a few packages to make development practical

• Mux (for route handling)
• gorm (an orm for golang to interface with databases)
• jwt-go [to help create jwt for Auth]
• bcrypt (to hash passwords)

Things I have learned #

importing packages are fairly similar to other languages as python. In Golang we can import a package like,

import("os")

or for multiple imports,

import(
  "os"
  "fmt"
  "net/http"
)

These are packages that come with Go, but we can also import other people’s packages with an import path to their github.

import(
  "os"
  "fmt"
  "net/http"
  "github.com/gorilla/mux
)

So importing packages are pretty simple. While there seems to be a few different dependency managers in Golang there is no standard at this time like NPM for node. For this project I ended up using dep More on this in another post.

Another thing I learned from this project is export functions and how to use them in different files. This project is pretty small so the main.go handles all of the routing, and the functions that handle all of the logic is broken into different files. For example the /ring route returns all of the active rings. The function that handles communication to the database and return the values in json is in the rings.go file. For the main.go to be able to use the AllRings function all we need to do is capitalize the function. Any function in that file that isn’t capitalized can only be used within that file. Personally I like this simple practice. I have forgot to export a function in larger files and took some valuable time debugging to figure out I forgot this.

Wrap up #

The project is hosted in github and still needs some work. This is a side project that gets used only a few times a year so I continue to work on it from time to time. If you want to check it out head over and have a look at my github