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Description

This starter kit is a starting point for building production grade scalable web service applications. The goal of this project is to provide a proven starting point for new projects that reduce the repetitive tasks in getting a new project launched to production. It uses minimal dependencies, implements idiomatic code and follows Go best practices. Collectively, the project lays out everything logically to minimize guess work and enable engineers to quickly maintain a mental model for the project. This in turn will make current developers happy and expedite on-boarding of new engineers.

This project should not be considered a web framework. Coding is a discovery process and with that, this project leaves you in control of your project’s architecture and development. There are five areas of expertise that an engineer or their engineering team must do for a project to grow and scale. Based on our experience, a few core decisions were made for each of these areas that help you focus initially on writing the business logic.

• Micro level - Since business applications require data storage this project implements Postgres. The implementation facilitates the data semantics that define the data being captured and their relationships.
• Macro level - The project architecture and design provides basic project structure and foundation for development.
• Business logic - Defines an example Go packages that helps illustrate where value generating activities should reside and how the code will be delivered to clients.
• Deployment and Operations - Integrates with CircleCI and GCP/GKE for serverless deployments.
• Observability - Implements OpenCensus and Go standard library support to facilitate observability.

Features

This project contains the following features:

• Minimal web application using standard html/template package.
• Middleware integration.
• Database support using Postgres.
• CRUD based pattern.
• Role-based access control (RBAC).
• Account signup and user management.
• Distributed logging and tracing.
• Integration with Opencensus for enterprise-level observability.
• Testing patterns.
• Use of Docker, Docker Compose, and Makefiles.
• Vendoring dependencies with Modules, requires Go 1.12 or higher.
• Continuous deployment pipeline.
• Serverless deployments.
• CLI with boilerplate templates to reduce repetitive copy/pasting.
• Integration with CircleCI for enterprise-level CI/CD.
• GCP/GKE and Local Kind support for Kubernetes.

Business Problem

This project is solving the problem of providing a backend for a sales-api that supports someone running a multi-family garage sale. Authenticated users can maintain a list of products for sale. These products can be retrieved as well.