Go Programming Blueprints - Second Edition

Table of Contents

Go Programming Blueprints Second Edition

Credits

About the Author

Acknowledgments

About the Reviewer

www.PacktPub.com

Why subscribe?

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Chat Application with Web Sockets

A simple web server

Separating views from logic using templates

Doing things once

Using your own handlers

Properly building and executing Go programs

Modeling a chat room and clients on the server

Modeling the client

Modeling a room

Concurrency programming using idiomatic Go

Turning a room into an HTTP handler

Using helper functions to remove complexity

Creating and using rooms

Building an HTML and JavaScript chat client

Getting more out of templates

Tracing code to get a look under the hood

Writing a package using TDD

Interfaces

Unit tests

Red-green testing

Implementing the interface

Unexported types being returned to users

Using our new trace package

Making tracing optional

Clean package APIs

Summary

2. Adding User Accounts

Handlers all the way down

Making a pretty social sign-in page

Endpoints with dynamic paths

Getting started with OAuth2

Open source OAuth2 packages

Tell the authorization providers about your app

Implementing external logging in

Logging in

Handling the response from the provider

Presenting the user data

Augmenting messages with additional data

Summary

3. Three Ways to Implement Profile Pictures

Avatars from the OAuth2 server

Getting the avatar URL

Transmitting the avatar URL

Adding the avatar to the user interface

Logging out

Making things prettier

Implementing Gravatar

Abstracting the avatar URL process

The auth service and the avatar's implementation

Using an implementation

The Gravatar implementation

Uploading an avatar picture

User identification

An upload form

Handling the upload

Serving the images

The Avatar implementation for local files

Supporting different file types

Refactoring and optimizing our code

Replacing concrete types with interfaces

Changing interfaces in a test-driven way

Fixing the existing implementations

Global variables versus fields

Implementing our new design

Tidying up and testing

Combining all three implementations

Summary

4. Command-Line Tools to Find Domain Names

Pipe design for command-line tools

Five simple programs

Sprinkle

Domainify

Coolify

Synonyms

Using environment variables for configuration

Consuming a web API

Getting domain suggestions

Available

Composing all five programs

One program to rule them all

Summary

5. Building Distributed Systems and Working with Flexible Data

The system design

The database design

Installing the environment

Introducing NSQ

NSQ driver for Go

Introducing MongoDB

MongoDB driver for Go

Starting the environment

Reading votes from Twitter

Authorization with Twitter

Extracting the connection

Reading environment variables

Reading from MongoDB

Reading from Twitter

Signal channels

Publishing to NSQ

Gracefully starting and stopping programs

Testing

Counting votes

Connecting to the database

Consuming messages in NSQ

Keeping the database updated

Responding to Ctrl + C

Running our solution

Summary

6. Exposing Data and Functionality through a RESTful Data Web Service API

RESTful API design

Sharing data between handlers

Context keys

Wrapping handler functions

API keys

Cross-origin resource sharing

Injecting dependencies

Responding

Understanding the request

Serving our API with one function

Using handler function wrappers

Handling endpoints

Using tags to add metadata to structs

Many operations with a single handler

Reading polls

Creating a poll

Deleting a poll

CORS support

Testing our API using curl

A web client that consumes the API

Index page showing a list of polls

Creating a new poll

Showing the details of a poll

Running the solution

Summary

7. Random Recommendations Web Service

The project overview

Project design specifics

Representing data in code

Public views of Go structs

Generating random recommendations

The Google Places API key

Enumerators in Go

Test-driven enumerator

Querying the Google Places API

Building recommendations

Handlers that use query parameters

CORS

Testing our API

Web application

Summary

8. Filesystem Backup

Solution design

The project structure

The backup package

Considering obvious interfaces first

Testing interfaces by implementing them

Has the filesystem changed?

Checking for changes and initiating a backup

Hardcoding is OK for a short while

The user command-line tool

Persisting small data

Parsing arguments

Listing the paths

String representations for your own types

Adding paths

Removing paths

Using our new tool

The daemon backup tool

Duplicated structures

Caching data

Infinite loops

Updating filedb records

Testing our solution

Summary

9. Building a Q&A Application for Google App Engine

The Google App Engine SDK for Go

Creating your application

App Engine applications are Go packages

The app.yaml file

Running simple applications locally

Deploying simple applications to Google App Engine

Modules in Google App Engine

Specifying modules

Routing to modules with dispatch.yaml

Google Cloud Datastore

Denormalizing data

Entities and data access

Keys in Google Cloud Datastore

Putting data into Google Cloud Datastore

Reading data from Google Cloud Datastore

Google App Engine users

Embedding denormalized data

Transactions in Google Cloud Datastore

Using transactions to maintain counters

Avoiding early abstraction

Querying in Google Cloud Datastore

Votes

Indexing

Embedding a different view of entities

Casting a vote

Accessing parents via datastore.Key

Line of sight in code

Exposing data operations over HTTP

Optional features with type assertions

Response helpers

Parsing path parameters

Exposing functionality via an HTTP API

HTTP routing in Go

Context in Google App Engine

Decoding key strings

Using query parameters

Anonymous structs for request data

Writing self-similar code

Validation methods that return an error

Mapping the router handlers

Running apps with multiple modules

Testing locally

Using the admin console

Automatically generated indexes

Deploying apps with multiple modules

Summary

10. Micro-services in Go with the Go kit Framework

Introducing gRPC

Protocol buffers

Installing protocol buffers

Protocol buffers language

Generating Go code

Building the service

Starting with tests

Constructors in Go

Hashing and validating passwords with bcrypt

Modeling method calls with requests and responses

Endpoints in Go kit

Making endpoints for service methods

Different levels of error

Wrapping endpoints into a Service implementation

An HTTP server in Go kit

A gRPC server in Go kit

Translating from protocol buffer types to our types

Creating a server command

Using Go kit endpoints

Running the HTTP server

Running the gRPC server

Preventing a main function from terminating immediately

Consuming the service over HTTP

Building a gRPC client

A command-line tool to consume the service

Parsing arguments in CLIs

Maintaining good line of sight by extracting case bodies

Installing tools from the Go source code

Rate limiting with service middleware

Middleware in Go kit

Manually testing the rate limiter

Graceful rate limiting

Summary

11. Deploying Go Applications Using Docker

Using Docker locally

Installing Docker tools

Dockerfile

Building Go binaries for different architectures

Building a Docker image

Running a Docker image locally

Inspecting Docker processes

Stopping a Docker instance

Deploying Docker images

Deploying to Docker Hub

Deploying to Digital Ocean

Creating a droplet

Accessing the droplet's console

Pulling Docker images

Running Docker images in the cloud

Accessing Docker images in the cloud

Summary

Appendix. Good Practices for a Stable Go Environment

Installing Go

Configuring Go

Getting GOPATH right

Go tools

Cleaning up, building, and running tests on save

Integrated developer environments

Sublime Text 3

Visual Studio Code

Summary

Go Programming Blueprints Second Edition

Go Programming Blueprints Second Edition

Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: January 2015

Second edition: October 2016

Production reference: 1211016

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

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ISBN 978-1-78646-894-9

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Credits

About the Author

Mat Ryer has been programming computers since he was 6 years old; he and his father would build games and programs, first in BASIC on a ZX Spectrum and then in AmigaBASIC and AMOS on Commodore Amiga. Many hours were spent on manually copying the code from Amiga Format magazine and tweaking variables or moving GOTO statements around to see what might happen. The same spirit of exploration and obsession with programming led Mat to start work with a local agency in Mansfield, England, when he was 18, where he started to build websites and services.

In 2006, Mat left rural Nottinghamshire for London, where he took a job at BT. It was here that he worked with a talented group of developers and managers on honing his agile development skills and developing the light flavor that he still uses today.

After being contracted around London for a few years, coding everything from C# and Objective-C to Ruby and JavaScript, Mat noticed a new systems language called Go that Google was pioneering. Since it addressed very pertinent and relevant modern technical challenges, Mat started using it to solve problems while the language was still in the beta stage and he has used it ever since.

In 2012, Mat moved to Boulder, Colorado, where he worked on a variety of projects, from big data web services and highly available systems to small side projects and charitable endeavors. He returned home, to London, in 2015 after the company he was working in was sold. Mat, to this day, continues to use Go to build a variety of products, services, and open-source projects. He writes articles about Go on his blog at matryer.com and tweets about Go with the handle @matryer.

Mat is a regular speaker at Go conferences around the world and encourages people to come up and introduce themselves if their paths ever cross.

Acknowledgments

I wouldn't have been able to write this book, or the second edition, without the help of the wonderful Laurie Edwards, who, while working on her own projects took the time to keep me organized and focused. Without her continuous and undying support, I dare say this book (along with every other project I have embarked on) would never have happened. Development heroes of mine include David Hernández (@dahernan on GitHub), who delights in telling me that my ideas are terrible before later falling in love with them; Ernesto Jiménez, who works extremely hard and extremely effectively on private and public projects alike; Tyler Bunnell (@tylerb on GitHub), who I learned Go with; and Ryan Quinn (@mazondo on GitHub), who seems to build an app a day and is living proof of how building something, however simple, is always better than building nothing. Thanks also goes out to Tim Schreiner for engaging in debates with me over the good and bad bits of Go as well as being my go-to guy on matters close to and beyond the fringes of computer science. Thanks go to the core Go team for building such a fun language and to the entire Go community, who have saved me months of development with their contributions. A special shout out to the Women Who Go and Go Bridge (@golangbridge on Twitter) groups, who are working increasingly hard to help us reach and maintain a rich and diversely populated community. Special thanks also goes to everyone who has supported me in my life and helped me in developing what I love into a career, including, but not limited to, Nick and Maggie Ryer, Chris Ryer, Glenn and Tracey Wilson, Phil Jackson, Aaron Edell, Sek Chai, David Hernández, Ernesto Jiménez, Blaine Garst, Tim and Stacey Stockhaus, Tom Szabo, Steve Davis, Mark Gray, John Motz, Rory Donnelly, Piotr Rojek, Corey Prak, Peter Bourgon, Andrew Gerrand, Dave Cheney, William (Bill) Kennedy, Matt Heath, Carlisia Campos, Tiffany Jernigan, Natalie Pistunovich, Simon Howard, Sean Thompson, Jeff Cavins, Edd Grant, Alan Meade, Steve Cart, Andy Jackson, Aditya Pradana, Andy Joslin, Kal Chottai, Tim Ryer, Emma Payne, Corey and Ashton Ryer, Clair Ryer, Gareth and Dylan Evans, Holly Smitheman, Phil Edwards, Tracey Edwards, Kirsten, Megan and Paul Krawczyk, Alex, Adriénne and Ethan Edwards, Chantelle and Greg Rosson, and all my other great friends and family. In the loving memory of Maggie Ryer, 1961 - 2015.

About the Reviewer

Michael Hamrah is a software engineer from Brooklyn, New York, specializing in scalable and distributed systems with more than a decade of development experience. He is currently working as a Senior Software Engineer at Uber focusing on metrics and monitoring systems, which handles billions of low-latency events per day across multiple data centers. He works primarily with Go and has an extensive experience with all levels of the software stack . He can be reached on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamrah.

David Hernandez is an independent software engineer from London. He helps companies improve their software. He has worked in different countries, such as Spain, UK, and Australia. He has participated in projects such as the BBC London Olympics 2012. Additionally, he has also helped to achieve Continuous Delivery at Atlassian, and he has delivered services to citizens at UK Government Digital Services.

You can find David speaking and collaborating at the Go London User Group, as Go is his favorite programming language.

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Preface

I have been blown away by the response Go Programming Blueprints has received, both from newcomers to Go, as well as well-respected titans of the community. The positive feedback has inspired me to do this second edition, where the code has been updated to the latest thinking and three new chapters have been added. Thanks to the contributions and questions from readers on the GitHub repository (https://github.com/matryer/goblueprints), I have been able to address some errors, fix some bugs, and clear some things up. See the README file on GitHub for a complete list of their names.

I decided to write Go Programming Blueprints because I wanted to expel the myth that Go, being a relatively young language and community, is a bad choice to write and iterate on software quickly. I have a friend who knocks out complete Ruby on Rails apps in a weekend by mashing up pre-existing gems and libraries; Rails as a platform has become known for enabling rapid development. As I do the same with Go and the ever-growing buffet of open source packages, I wanted to share some real-world examples of how we can quickly build and release software that performs well from day one and is ready to scale when our projects take off in a way that Rails cannot compete with. Of course, most scalability happens outside the language, but features such as Go's built-in concurrency mean you can get some very impressive results from even the most basic hardware, giving you a head start when things start to get real.

This book explores some very different projects, any of which can form the basis of a genuine startup. Whether it's a low-latency chat application, a domain name suggestion tool, a social polling and election service built on Twitter, or a random night out generator powered by Google Places, each chapter touches upon a variety of problems that most products or services written in Go will need to address. The solutions I present in this book are just one of many ways to tackle each project, and I will encourage you to make up your own mind about how I approached them. The concepts are more important than the code itself, but you'll hopefully pick up a few tips and tricks here and there that can go into your Go toolbelt.

New to this second edition, we will explore some practical modern architectural thinking, such as how to build for Google App Engine, what a microservice looks like, and how to package up our code with Docker and deploy to anywhere.

The process by which I wrote this book may be interesting because it represents something about the philosophies adopted by many agile developers. I started by giving myself the challenge of building a real deployable product (albeit a simple one; a minimum viable product, if you will) before getting stuck into it and writing a version 1. Once I got it working, I would rewrite it from scratch. It is said many times by novelists and journalists that the art of writing is rewriting; I have found this to be true for software as well. The first time we write a piece of code, all we are really doing is learning about the problem and how it might be tackled, as well as getting some of our thinking out of our heads and onto paper, or into a text editor. The second time we write it, we are applying our new knowledge to actually solve the problem. If you've never tried this, give it a shot—you might find that the quality of your code shoots up quite dramatically as I did. It doesn't mean the second time will be the last time—software evolves and we should try to keep it as cheap and disposable as possible so we don't mind throwing pieces away if they go stale or start to get in the way.

I write all of my code following Test-driven development (TDD) practices, some of which we will do together throughout the book and some you'll just see the result of in the final code. All of the test code can be found in the GitHub repositories for this book, even if it's not included in print.

Once I had my test-driven second versions completed, I started writing the chapter describing how and why I did what I did. In most cases, the iterative approach I took is left out of the book because it would just add pages of tweaks and edits, which would probably just become frustrating for the reader. However, on a couple of occasions, we will iterate together to get a feel of how a process of gradual improvements and small iterations (starting and keeping it simple and introducing complexity only when absolutely necessary) can be applied when writing Go packages and programs.

I moved to the United States from England in 2012, but that is not why the chapters are authored in American English; it was a requirement from the publisher. I suppose this book is aimed at an American audience, or perhaps it's because American English is the standard language of computing (in British code, properties that deal with color are spelled without the U). Either way, I apologize in advance for any trans-Atlantic slips; I know how pedantic programmers can be.

Any questions, improvements, suggestions, or debates (I love how opinionated the Go community—as well as the core team and the language itself—is) are more than welcome. These should probably take place in the GitHub issues for the book setup, specifically at https://github.com/matryer/goblueprints, so that everybody can take part.

Finally, I would be thrilled if somebody forms a start-up based on any of these projects, or makes use of them in other places. I would love to hear about it; you can tweet me at @matryer.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Chat Application with Web Sockets, shows how to build a complete web application that allows multiple people to have a real-time conversation right in their web browser. We will see how the NET/HTTP package let us serve HTML pages as well as connect to the client's browser with web sockets.

Chapter 2, Adding User Accounts, shows how to add OAuth to our chat application so that we can keep track of who is saying what, but let them log in using Google, Facebook, or GitHub.

Chapter 3, Three Ways to Implement Profile Pictures, explains how to add profile pictures to the chat application taken from either the authentication service, the Gravitar.com web service, or by allowing users to upload their own picture from their hard drive.

Chapter 4, Command-Line Tools to Find Domain Names, explores how easy building command-line tools is in Go and puts those skills to use to tackle the problem of finding the perfect domain name for our chat application. It also explores how easy Go makes it to utilize the standard-in and standard-out pipes to produce some pretty powerful composable tools.

Chapter 5, Building Distributed Systems and Working with Flexible Data, explains how to prepare for the future of democracy by building a highly-scalable Twitter polling and vote counting engine powered by NSQ and MongoDB.

Chapter 6, Exposing Data and Functionality through a RESTful Data Web Service API, looks at how to expose the capabilities we built in Chapter 5, Building Distributed Systems and Working with Flexible Data, through a JSON web service, specifically how the wrapping http.HandlerFunc functions give us a powerful pipeline pattern.

Chapter 7, Random Recommendations Web Service, shows how to consume the Google Places API to generate a location-based random recommendations API that represents a fun way to explore any area. It also explores why it's important to keep internal data structures private, controlling the public view into the same data, as well as how to implement enumerators in Go.

Chapter 8, Filesystem Backup, helps to build a simple but powerful filesystem backup tool for our code projects and explore interacting with the filesystem using the OS  package from the Go standard library. It also looks at how Go's interfaces allow simple abstractions to yield powerful results.

Chapter 9, Building a Q&A Application for Google App Engine, shows how to build applications that can be deployed to Google's infrastructure and run at high scale with little to no operational duties for us. The project we build utilizes some of the cloud services available on Google App Engine, including the Google Cloud Datastore—a highly available and extremely fast schema-less data storage option.

Chapter 10, Micro-services in Go with the Go Kit Framework, explores a modern software architecture paradigm whereby large monolithic applications are broken down into discrete services with a singular focus. The services run independently of each other, allowing them to be individually scaled to meet demand. Go Kit is a software framework that addresses some of the challenges of a microservice architecture while remaining agnostic to the implementation details.

Chapter 11, Deploying Go Applications Using Docker, looks at how simple it is to build Docker images to package and deploy the application we built in Chapter 9, Building a Q&A Application for Google App Engine. We will write a Dockerfile that describes the image, and use the Docker tools to build the image, which we will then deploy to the Digital Ocean cloud.

Appendix, Good Practices for a Stable Go Environment, shows how to install Go from scratch on a new machine and discusses some of the environmental options we have and the impact they might have in the future. We will look at a few code editor (or IDE—Integrated Developer Environment) options and also consider how collaboration might influence some of our decisions as well as the impact open sourcing our packages might have.

What you need for this book

To compile and run the code from this book, you will need a computer capable of running an operating system that supports the Go toolset, a list of which can be found at https://golang.org/doc/install#requirements.

Appendix, Good Practices for a Stable Go Environment, has some useful tips to install Go and set up your development environment, including how to work with the GOPATH environment variable.

Who this book is for

This book is for all Go programmers, ranging from beginners looking to explore the language by building real projects to expert gophers with an interest in how the language can be applied in interesting ways.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning. Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: You will notice that the deployable artifact for your application is the webApp.war file.

A block of code is set as follows:

package meander

type Cost int8

const (

  _ Cost = iota

  Cost1

  Cost2

  Cost3

  Cost4

  Cost5

)

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

go build -o project && ./project

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: Once you install Xcode, you open Preferences and navigate to the Downloads section

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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Errata

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Chapter 1.  Chat Application with Web Sockets

Go is great for writing high-performance, concurrent server applications and tools, and the Web is the perfect medium over which to deliver them. It would be difficult these days to find a gadget that is not web-enabled and this allows us to build a single application that targets almost all platforms and devices.

Our first project will be a web-based chat application that allows multiple users to have a real-time conversation right in their web browser. Idiomatic Go applications are often composed of many packages, which are organized by having code in different folders, and this is also true of the Go standard library. We will start by building a simple web server using the net/http package, which