Introducing Marten – The Go Web Framework Where Nothing Gets In Your Way

#go #webdev #backend

Hey Go community 👋

If you’ve ever felt that:

Gin is great but the custom context wrapping makes things leak into your business logic
Chi is beautifully minimal but you end up pulling in 5–10 extra middleware packages anyway
You just want something clean, fast, and zero external dependencies

…then I built Marten exactly for that feeling.

What is Marten?

Marten is a minimalist Go web framework with one core philosophy:

"The framework you reach for when you want nothing in the way."

It gives you:

Ergonomic handler helpers (c.JSON, c.Bind, c.Param, c.Query, etc.)
Full stdlib compatibility – real context.Context is untouched at c.Request.Context()
Zero external dependencies – just net/http + Go stdlib
Built-in production middleware suite (no extra imports needed):
- gzip compression (with pooling)
- CORS (configurable, secure wildcard handling)
- Secure headers (HSTS, XSS-Protection, CSP, etc.)
- Rate limiting
- Timeout
- Body limit
- Basic auth
- Request ID
- No-cache
- ETag
- Panic recovery
- Logger

All applied via clean global/group/route-level chaining.

Quick Hello World

package main

import "github.com/gomarten/marten"

func main() {
    app := marten.New()

    app.GET("/", func(c *marten.Ctx) error {
        return c.JSON(200, map[string]string{"message": "Hello from Marten! 🚀"})
    })

    // Add middleware in one line
    app.Use(marten.Middleware.Recover, marten.Middleware.Logger, marten.Middleware.Compress())

    app.Run(":8080")
}

Why Another Framework?

Because sometimes you want:

Gin-like productivity without the custom context baggage
Chi-like purity with more batteries included
The confidence that your app will compile and behave the same 5 years from now (no dependency hell)