Go Programming Blueprints

Table of Contents

Go Programming Blueprints

Credits

About the Author

Acknowledgments

About the Reviewers

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Why subscribe?

Free access for Packt account holders

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

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

Use 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 Authentication

Handlers all the way down

Making a pretty social sign-in page

Endpoints with dynamic paths

OAuth2

Open source OAuth2 packages

Tell the authentication 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 authentication 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 authentication service and avatar's implementation

Using an implementation

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 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

Exercise – configurable transformations

Domainify

Exercise – making top-level domains configurable

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

System design

Database design

Installing the environment

NSQ

NSQ driver for Go

MongoDB

MongoDB driver for Go

Starting the environment

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

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

Wrapping handler functions

API key

Database session

Per request variables

Cross-browser resource sharing

Responding

Understanding the request

A simple main function to serve our API

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

An index page showing a list of polls

A page to create a new poll

A page to show details of the poll

Running the solution

Summary

7. Random Recommendations Web Service

Project overview

Project design specifics

Representing data in code

Public views of Go structs

Generating random recommendations

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

Project structure

Backup package

Obvious interfaces?

Implementing ZIP

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

A. Good Practices for a Stable Go Environment

Installing Go

Installing the C tools

Downloading and building Go from the source

Configuring Go

Getting GOPATH right

Go tools

Cleaning up, building, and running tests on save

Sublime Text 3

Summary

Index

Go Programming Blueprints

Go Programming Blueprints

Copyright © 2015 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

Production reference: 1200115

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

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Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78398-802-0

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Credits

Author

Mat Ryer

Reviewers

Tyler Bunnell

Michael Hamrah

Nimish Parmar

Commissioning Editor

Kunal Parikh

Acquisition Editor

Richard Brookes-Bland

Content Development Editor

Govindan Kurumangattu

Technical Editor

Sebastian Rodrigues

Copy Editor

Vijay Tase

Project Coordinator

Shipra Chawhan

Proofreaders

Simran Bhogal

Maria Gould

Ameesha Green

Paul Hindle

Indexer

Hemangini Bari

Graphics

Abhinash Sahu

Production Coordinator

Komal Ramchandani

Cover Work

Komal Ramchandani

About the Author

Mat Ryer has a family legend (or conspiracy) that tells of him programming computers from the age of 6—he and his father would build games and programs, first BASIC on a ZX Spectrum then later AmigaBASIC and AMOS on their Commodore Amiga. Many hours were spent manually copying out code from the Amiga Format magazine, before spending more still 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 for a local agency in Mansfield, England, when he was 18, where he started to build websites and services.

In 2006, Mat's wife, Laurie, took a job at the Science Museum in London, and so they both left rural Nottinghamshire for the big city, where Mat took a job at BT. It was here that he worked with a talented group of developers and managers on honing agile development skills and developing a light flavor that he still uses today.

After contracting 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. Because it addressed very pertinent and relevant modern technical challenges, Mat started using it to solve problems while the language was still in beta and he has used it ever since.

In 2012, Mat and Laurie left England to live in Boulder, Colorado, where Mat works on a variety of projects, from big data web services and highly available systems to small side projects and charitable endeavors.

Acknowledgments

I wouldn't have been able to write this book 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 embark on) would never have happened.

Tyler Bunnell (@tylerb on GitHub)—who, believe it or not, I met on Google Code (working on the Goweb project)—is my Go life partner. We have paired on many projects so far, and will no doubt continue to do so into the future, until one of us (him) is tragically killed by the other due to some disagreement over proper use of the sync package! Tyler and I learned Go together, and he was also gracious enough to become a technical reviewer for this book—so in a way, you can blame any mistakes on him!

Other development heroes of mine include 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 go 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.

Special thanks also go to everyone who has supported me and helped me make doing what I love into a career, including but not limited to Nick Ryer (my dad, for getting me into computers in the first place), Maggie Ryer, Chris Ryer, Glenn Wilson, Phil Jackson, Jeff Cavins, Simon Howard, Edd Grant, Alan Meade, Steve Cart, Andy Jackson, Aditya Pradana, Andy Joslin, Simon Howard, Phil Edwards, Tracey Edwards, and all my other great friends and family.

About the Reviewers

Tyler Bunnell (@tylerb on GitHub) is an entrepreneur and developer whose inquisitive personality has enabled him to become an avid problem solver, seeking out knowledge and solutions and always aiming to be innovative and ahead of the curve.

His programming portfolio is interestingly eclectic; he cofounded Mizage, where he created a line of OS X applications, including Divvy, before partnering with a vocal coach to create Voice Tutor for iOS—an application that helps everyone sing without the need for private lessons. In 2012, Tyler took an interest in an emerging language, Go, where he made an immediate impact with contributions to the Go open source community by cofounding popular projects such as Testify, Graceful, and Genny, amongst other things. Most recently, he has turned his attention to an exciting new start-up, but he can't talk about that one just yet.

Michael Hamrah is a software engineer from Brooklyn, New York, who specializes in scalable, distributed systems for the Web with a focus on API design, event-driven asynchronous programming, and data modeling and storage. He works primarily with Scala and Go, and has extensive experience with all levels of the software stack. He can be reached via LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamrah.

Nimish Parmar has over 10 years of experience building high performance distributed systems. After receiving his bachelor's degree in computer engineering from the University of Mumbai, Nimish completed a master of science in computer science from the University of Southern California. He was the technical reviewer for the book Amazon Web Services: Migrating your .NET Enterprise Application, Packt Publishing

He's currently working as a senior software engineer at StumbleUpon in San Francisco. Nimish is a die-hard USC Trojans football fan and enjoys snowboarding during winter.

I'd like to thank my parents, Ragini and Bipin. Words can't describe how fortunate I am to have received your endless love and support.

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Preface

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 for writing and iterating 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. Since 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 great 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 like 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 five very different projects, any of which could form the basis of a genuine start-up. 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 the book are just one of many ways to tackle each project, and I would 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.

The process by which I wrote this book might 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; 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 has been 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 chapters 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 would start 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 likely 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 set up 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 and let me know either way.

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 see how the net/http package lets us serve HTML pages as well as connect to the client's browser with web sockets.

Chapter 2, Adding Authentication, 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 wrapping http.HandlerFunc functions gives 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.

Appendix, Good Practices for a Stable Go Environment, teaches us 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 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—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 styles of text 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: We can use functionality from other packages using the import keyword, after we have used go get to download them.

A block of code is set as follows:

package meander

type Cost int8

const (

  _ Cost = iota

  Cost1

  Cost2

  Cost3

  Cost4

  Cost5

)

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

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, in menus or dialog boxes for example, 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