Go Starter Site -

This repository exists to act as a good starting point when developing a new website using Go. When I first started learning how to build websites with Go, I followed Alex Edward's advice in his book Let's Go. While the book is fantastic, and it's easy to recommend people read, I noticed that there's a lot of boilerplate that Go sites need.

There are some solutions I found out there that people had done to remedy this problem themselves. However, I wasn't a big fan of them because they included a lot of extra stuff that not everyone needed or wanted (Templ, Tailwind, and/or React). Thus, I had the idea to make a useful, yet generic enough, Go site template that aims to have a lot of the boilerplate already done. This way, one can easily clone the repository, swap out the module name, and hit the ground running.

Getting Started

While on desktop, click the "Use this template" button located near the top right of the page and follow the steps provided.

Change the module name from github.com/rynhndrcksn/go-starter-site to match your repository.

Note

Don't forget to update all the import paths throughout the project as well!

Dependencies

In an effort to keep third party dependencies to a minimum, only the following ones have been added:

1. https://github.com/alexedwards/scs/pgxstore | Store sessions in Postgres
2. https://github.com/alexedwards/scs | Session management
3. https://github.com/jackc/pgx | PostgreSQL driver
4. https://github.com/julienschmidt/httprouter | Http router

There are some development related dependencies that I recommend installing to your local machine:

1. https://github.com/air-verse/air | Live reloading of Go binary (make dev/web makes use of this)
2. https://staticcheck.dev | Linter for Go (make audit makes use of this).
   1. This can be installed by running go install honnef.co/go/tools/cmd/staticcheck@latest (as of August 2024).

Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

Please refer to contributing.md for more information.

Reference

If you're curious why the project is structured this way, look here!

• cmd/ contains the entry points for the application.
  • web/ contains the server side logic for the website (routing, handlers, etc.).
• internal/ contains things like validators, models, sending emails, etc.
  • data/ contains models, storing/retrieving things from a database, etc.
  • vcs/ contains logic for figuring out what version of the site is running.
• migrations/ contains all the migration files for the site.
• ui/ contains everything relating to HTML templates and site assets (css, js, and images).
  • html/ contains all the templates for constructing the website.
    • components/ contains components to embed into partials and/or pages.
    • pages/ contains full page templates.
    • partials/ contains partial templates for embedding into other templates.
  • static/ contains all the assets for the site.
    • css/ contains all the stylesheets for the site.
    • js/ contains all the scripts for the site.

License

This is released under the MIT license, which can be viewed here.