A few months ago, I started my journey from PHP to Go on a new app in my company.
Some 3 months after, I posted another Article on DEV talking about my feedbacks on the language.
Now it's the time to share about the libraries & tools I've been using so far. Note that I don't use any framework nor any ORM. Just the right libraries to do the job.
Libraries
1. Viper
🌠 7,353
Go configuration with fangs!
Many Go projects are built using Viper including:
Install
go get github.com/spf13/viperWhat is Viper?
Viper is a complete configuration solution for Go applications including 12-Factor apps. It is designed to work within an application, and can handle all types of configuration needs and formats. It supports:
- setting defaults
- reading from JSON, TOML, YAML, HCL, envfile and Java properties config files
- live watching and re-reading of config files (optional)
- reading from environment variables
- reading from remote config systems (etcd or Consul), and watching changes
- reading from command line flags
- reading from buffer
- setting explicit values
Viper can be thought of as a registry for all of your applications configuration needs.
Why Viper?
When building a modern application, you don’t want to worry about configuration file formats; you want to focus on building…
2. Gin Gonic
🌠 23,913
gin-gonic
/
gin
Gin is a HTTP web framework written in Go (Golang). It features a Martini-like API with much better performance -- up to 40 times faster. If you need smashing performance, get yourself some Gin.
Gin Web Framework
Gin is a web framework written in Go (Golang). It features a martini-like API with performance that is up to 40 times faster thanks to httprouter. If you need performance and good productivity, you will love Gin.
Contents
-
Gin Web Framework
- Contents
- Installation
- Quick start
- Benchmarks
- Gin v1. stable
- Build with jsoniter
-
API Examples
- Using GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE and OPTIONS
- Parameters in path
- Querystring parameters
- Multipart/Urlencoded Form
- Another example: query + post form
- Map as querystring or postform parameters
- Upload files
- Grouping routes
- Blank Gin without middleware by default
- Using middleware
- How to write log file
- Custom Log Format
- Controlling Log output coloring
- Model binding and validation
- Custom Validators
- Only Bind Query String
- Bind Query String or Post Data
- Bind Uri
- Bind Header
- Bind HTML checkboxes
- Multipart/Urlencoded binding
- XML, JSON, YAML and ProtoBuf rendering
- Serving static…
3. Mgo
🌠 1,385
globalsign
/
mgo
The MongoDB driver for Go
The MongoDB driver for Go
This fork has had a few improvements by ourselves as well as several PR's merged from the original mgo repo that are currently awaiting review Changes are mostly geared towards performance improvements and bug fixes, though a few new features have been added.
Further PR's (with tests) are welcome, but please maintain backwards compatibility.
Detailed documentation of the API is available at GoDoc.
A sub-package that implements the BSON specification is also included, and may be used independently of the driver.
Supported Versions
mgo is known to work well on (and has integration tests against) MongoDB v3.0, 3.2, 3.4 and 3.6.
MongoDB 4.0 is currently experimental - we would happily accept PRs to help improve support!
Changes
4. Zap
🌠 5,901
⚡ zap 
Blazing fast, structured, leveled logging in Go.
Installation
go get -u go.uber.org/zap
Note that zap only supports the two most recent minor versions of Go.
Quick Start
In contexts where performance is nice, but not critical, use the
SugaredLogger. It's 4-10x faster than other structured logging
packages and includes both structured and printf-style APIs.
logger, _ := zap.NewProduction()
defer logger.Sync() // flushes buffer, if any
sugar := logger.Sugar()
sugar.Infow("failed to fetch URL"
// Structured context as loosely typed key-value pairs.
"url", url
"attempt", 3
"backoff", time.Second,
)
sugar.Infof("Failed to fetch URL: %s", url)When performance and type safety are critical, use the Logger. It's even
faster than the SugaredLogger and allocates far less, but it only…
5. Go.uuid gofrs/uuid
🌠 394
UUID
Package uuid provides a pure Go implementation of Universally Unique Identifiers (UUID) variant as defined in RFC-4122. This package supports both the creation and parsing of UUIDs in different formats.
This package supports the following UUID versions:
- Version 1, based on timestamp and MAC address (RFC-4122)
- Version 2, based on timestamp, MAC address and POSIX UID/GID (DCE 1.1)
- Version 3, based on MD5 hashing of a named value (RFC-4122)
- Version 4, based on random numbers (RFC-4122)
- Version 5, based on SHA-1 hashing of a named value (RFC-4122)
Project History
This project was originally forked from the github.com/satori/go.uuid repository after it appeared to be no longer maintained, while exhibiting critical flaws. We have decided to take over this project to ensure it receives regular maintenance for the benefit of the larger Go community.
We'd like to thank Maxim Bublis for his hard work on the original iteration of the…
6. JWT-Go
🌠 4,849
jwt-go
A go (or 'golang' for search engine friendliness) implementation of JSON Web Tokens
NEW VERSION COMING: There have been a lot of improvements suggested since the version 3.0.0 released in 2016. I'm working now on cutting two different releases: 3.2.0 will contain any non-breaking changes or enhancements. 4.0.0 will follow shortly which will include breaking changes. See the 4.0.0 milestone to get an idea of what's coming. If you have other ideas, or would like to participate in 4.0.0, now's the time. If you depend on this library and don't want to be interrupted, I recommend you use your dependency mangement tool to pin to version 3.
SECURITY NOTICE: Some older versions of Go have a security issue in the cryotp/elliptic. Recommendation is to upgrade to at least 1.8.3. See issue #216 for more detail.
SECURITY NOTICE: It's important that you validate the alg presented is what you expect…
7. Testify
🌠 6,634
stretchr
/
testify
A toolkit with common assertions and mocks that plays nicely with the standard library
Testify - Thou Shalt Write Tests
Go code (golang) set of packages that provide many tools for testifying that your code will behave as you intend.
Features include:
Get started:
- Install testify with one line of code, or update it with another
- For an introduction to writing test code in Go, see http://golang.org/doc/code.html#Testing
- Check out the API Documentation http://godoc.org/github.com/stretchr/testify
- To make your testing life easier, check out our other project, gorc
- A little about Test-Driven Development (TDD)
assert package
The assert package provides some helpful methods that allow you to write better test code in Go.
- Prints friendly, easy to read failure descriptions
- Allows for very readable code
- Optionally annotate each assertion with a message
See it…
8. Go-yaml
🌠 2,692
YAML support for the Go language
Introduction
The yaml package enables Go programs to comfortably encode and decode YAML values. It was developed within Canonical as part of the juju project, and is based on a pure Go port of the well-known libyaml C library to parse and generate YAML data quickly and reliably.
Compatibility
The yaml package supports most of YAML 1.1 and 1.2, including support for anchors, tags, map merging, etc. Multi-document unmarshalling is not yet implemented, and base-60 floats from YAML 1.1 are purposefully not supported since they're a poor design and are gone in YAML 1.2.
Installation and usage
The import path for the package is gopkg.in/yaml.v2.
To install it, run:
go get gopkg.in/yaml.v2
API documentation
If opened in a browser, the import path itself leads to the API documentation:
API stability
The package API for yaml v2 will remain stable as described in…
Tools
1. Gomock + mockgen
🌠 2,023
Gomock is a testing library that allows you to mock your dependencies and to make assertions on them. Mockgen is a CLI tool packaged with gomock to create your mocks.
gomock 
GoMock is a mocking framework for the Go programming language. It
integrates well with Go's built-in testing package, but can be used in other
contexts too.
Installation
Once you have installed Go, install the mockgen tool.
To get the latest released version use:
GO111MODULE=on go get github.com/golang/mock/mockgen@v1.4.3If you use mockgen in your CI pipeline, it may be more appropriate to fixate
on a specific mockgen version.
Documentation
After installing, you can use go doc to get documentation:
go doc github.com/golang/mock/gomockAlternatively, there is an online reference for the package hosted on GoPkgDoc here.
Running mockgen
mockgen has two modes of operation: source and reflect
Source mode generates mock interfaces from a source file
It is enabled by using the -source flag. Other flags that
may be useful in this mode are -imports and -aux_files.
Example:
mockgen -source=foo.go [other options]Reflect mode generates mock interfaces by…
2. Modd
🌠 977
A file watcher allowing you to restart your app, to run your unit tests and much more
Modd is a developer tool that triggers commands and manages daemons in response to filesystem changes.
If you use modd, you should also look at devd, a compact HTTP daemon for developers Devd integrates with modd, allowing you to trigger in-browser livereload with modd.
The repo contains a set of example modd.conf files that you can look at for a quick idea of what modd can do:
| Example | Description |
|---|---|
| frontend.conf | A front-end project with React + Browserify + Babel. Modd and devd replace many functions of Gulp/Grunt. |
| go.conf | Live unit tests for Go. |
| python.conf | Python + Redis, with devd managing livereload. |
Install
Modd is a single binary with no external dependencies, released for OSX Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. Go to the releases page, download the package for your OS, and copy the binary to somewhere on your PATH.
If you have a working Go installation, you…
I hope that you'll find some of these libs/tools useful for your needs.
Don't hesitate to propose the ones you find great.
Thank you for reading!
Top comments (19)
For anyone else reading this: do not use the
satori/uuidpackage.It has a number of very concerning flaws, with this one being the worst:
Please instead use: github.com/gofrs/uuid
Now on to the topic:
You want to build a Frameworkless App, but you use Gin, which is a framework. This is quite the incompatible premise, would you not say?
I would encourage using
gorilla/muxfor small niceties on top of the standard library, I personally think it's enough.Gin introduces too much magic and special "Gin only" behaviour and I personally am not a fan of that.
I though exactly the same ;)
Thanks for the security alert :)
Thanks for the security alert on using satori/go.uuid.
Regarding gin-gonic, I don't use it as a framework, but just as a router.
I'd get rid of gin, go really doesn't need frameworks.
There are many people who think you need a framework as soon as you start a new language, but forget that idea with go.
If you're using it just for the router, you could use julien schmidt directly.
I would suggest my own, but I don't think it's ready yet. I need to make sure it's bombproof first.
PS. I also switched from PHP, never looked back.
Happy Coding
I switched from gin router to httprouter. It's enough for my needs.
I also dropped viper to use builtin env var funcs.
I also dropped zap to use zerolog which is more simple.
In my toolbox, I gave a chance to gorm which a little ORM for Go.
I have to publish a new edition of my Go toolbox.
Nice, yes, simplicity is key for me.
I really like it too! However I've been using
gorilla/muxon prod for a long time now and it's never been an issue, I really appreciate it's "battle-hardened" quality and feel.It's one of the rare libraries I feel fully confident with because it's proved itself time and time again.
Not saying this isn't true of
chi, just that, that wasn't the choice we made for production back then, so I can't compare it at that level yet.Thanks for sharing these packages 📦 I’ve been making a few side projects with Go but always spent too much time trying to find the “right” libraries to use.
My twin brother started using an open-source project called the SaaS Startup Kit . It is an open-source project of Go code to bootstrap your software-as-a-service startup.
gitlab.com/geeks-accelerator/oss/s...
The goal of this project is to provide a proven approach for building new SaaS that reduces the repetitive tasks in getting a new software service launched to production that can easily be scaled and ready to onboard enterprise clients.
Great post! Do you have a recommendation on handling dependencies in your Go projects? This has probably been the biggest source of confusion in my experience with Go.
Hi Esteban!
I gave a chance to
go modeven if the support is still experimental in the 1.11, because it should be stable in the release 1.12.I bet it will be the future of Go dependency management and will replace
go dep.I found out that
go modis on the good way to be a solid dependency manager for Go. You just have to init yourgo.modby typinggo mod initand then, every time you'll typego get something, it will add it to your project's dependencies.It's also a good way to organize your code in modules.
I created an authentication package here : github.com/dimensi0n/persona (Cookies way only)
+1 for chi
This is great stuff. Thanks for sharing! Just starting out with Go myself.
I would also try to use the official MongoDB driver from now on:
github.com/mongodb/mongo-go-driver
When I started learning Go in September of 2018, it wasn't ready for production.
Do you know if it's ready now ?
good one!!
At a first glance it seems very similar to echo which I use for personal projects. I'll try to check how they differ, but if you know, please fill me in.