Introduction to Golang [Part I]

Working for one of the clients here at ThoughtWorks, I found myself working a lot on Golang. Go has been a great language to work on but it never felt that way the first time I started on it. To begin with, it has a strange syntax, as opposed to most other strongly typed languages. The Golang tour is a great place to start with.

Over the next few articles, I will walk you through the basic Setup and CRUD operations in Golang using PostgreSQL database. You can find the repository here.

Server setup

As part of this project, I will be using Mux as a request router and dispatcher for matching incoming requests to their respective handler.

Let's start with /ping, the basic health-check route.

1. Create a file named main.go under project root directory. Add the following lines in your main().

   func main() {
       r := mux.NewRouter()
       r.HandleFunc("/ping", handler.PingHandler).Methods("GET")
   
       if err := http.ListenAndServe(":3000", r); err != nil {
           log.Fatal(err)
       }
   }

2. Create a directory named handler and a file ping_handler.go under it.

3. Add the following lines in ping_handler.go.

   func PingHandler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
       w.Header().Set("Content-Type", "application/json")
       w.WriteHeader(http.StatusOK)
       w.Write([]byte("{\"success\": \"pong\"}"))
   }

4. In your terminal, run the command go run main.go. You should now see your server running on port 3000.

5. localhost:3000/ping should now return something like {"success": "pong"}.

There you go. You have your Golang server up and running, ready to serve more requests. In the next article, I will demonstrate the usage of .yml files in Golang.