Some weeks ago, I read about different approaches for APIs styles. I’ve written a little bit about gRPC, but then I’ve realized that I’ve never implemented a simple CRUD with Go :O
There’s a bunch of libraries and frameworks to help with that kind of application, like Revel, Beego, Web.go, Gorilla, Gin, Martini, and many others.
After spending some time understanding the pros and cons of the options, I could found the perfect combination (for me, of course). I’ve decided to pick Gin as the router since it’s one of the fastest options, the GORM as the ORM since it has the highest score in the libhunt.
So, let’s build our minimalistic service!
1) Setup
The init method is called before the main by convention. So we use it to initialize some variables and call db.AutoMigrate(&User{}) to ensure that our table of users will be available:
2) CRUD operations
With our database initialized, we can write each CRUD operation in a different method, just like this:
Look at the different methods we’re calling into db (gorm.DB) and into c (gin.Context) instances ;-)
3) Router
OK, we’ve finally finished all the operations. Now, we can expose our API with the router provided by Gin. So, let’s define our REST services for the users resource:
Conclusion
Yey! Our service is done. Notice that I’ve left some examples of calls with cURL into the code. Try them!
There are many other options to implement this out there. But I found the combination of Gin and GORM a right balance between readability and performance.
Here’s the full example https://github.com/karreiro/go-rest-demo :-) I hope you’ve enjoyed it!