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README.md

Workshop 2 - API REST in Go

In this workshop we will learn how to use the main functions of the http package in Go and how to create a REST API.

💡 A quick documentation about REST API.

Step 0: Initialization

All the required information to install the workshop's dependencies are given in the SETUP.md

Step 0.5: The codebase

We designed a boilerplate for this project, it will be useful to start more easily but also to understand all the required parts of an API.
You should have the following folders:

controllers: this is where you will design your routes endpoint. It will often be a wrapper that calls other APIs or the database itself
middlewares: those are functions that can be called to print logs or check access rights before entering a controller
routes: the core of the router, setting up all the routes handler, with their middlewares and controllers
models: wraps all the database calls

There are plenty of other important packages you may need in a real API, but these are the main ones you can be sure you'll need one time or another. Now let's code 🚀

Add a route on the endpoint /hello:

It uses the GET method
It responds "hello world"

You can test it by going to http://localhost:8080/hello in your browser or using postman

Step 1: Let's get started

You have successfully created an endpoint! The next step is to add message logs because our server doesn't print anything, yet we would like to know when a route is called to know if everything went well.

Create a middleware that logs the traffic of the API:

Use the log native package
Apply this middleware to the /hello route

Look at the example in the code and at this article 😉

💡 You can make this middleware global to all routes rather than calling it manually on each and every route you create

See how to request with postman 📡

Enter your URL and the method you wish to use in the titlebar and click Send.

Then the result (if there is any) will be printed out at the bottom.

Step 2: Authentication and security

On a real API, there are parts of your routes you only want some people to use.
To protect some routes from unknown users, we'll have to add another middleware.

Create an middleware that checks if the request has a header called Authorization and if it contains the allowed string
Create a route /auth/hello with both middlewares (logs and the one we've just created) to check if it works

In a real life scenario you will check if the field contains a token, and if this token is valid thanks to JSON Web Token for example

r.Header is of type map[string]string, you should take a look at how to check if a value exists within a map 😉

See how to send a header 📡

Go into the 3rd panel, there you will be able to create the headers that you want to send, toggle the checkbox to send them or not.

Step 3: Vars

Creating routes is nice, but we cannot receive variables from them... To do so, we will use "github.com/gorilla/mux" to have modular routes.

Create an endpoint /whoami/{user}

It uses the GET method
It responds I am $user with $user being the text sent in the URL

Look at the {``} syntax, these brackets indicate which part of the URL will contain vars

Check the mux docs for more information

Step 4: Database and data transfers

Last but not least, we will use the API to manipulate data in a database. As we don't have the time to setup a real database, we've created functions to fake the behavior of a simple database.

💡 You must import the models package, it contains 3 functions to manipulate users.

You will need to implement an endpoint for:

/add
- It uses the POST method
- It creates a user thanks to the information given in the body
/get/{id}
- It uses the GET method
- It gets a user based on its id
/del/{id}
- It uses the DELETE method
- It deletes a user based on its id

The body will contain a JSON that has the same structure that the one designed in the model package as model.Users

See how to send JSON in body 📡

Go into the 4th panel and select the raw option, then you can write your JSON (you can also copy this one).

Bonus

You should now have all the basis needed to create your own API, if you still want to play around with Go and all its usages, you can take a look at other go features like:

You can also use a real database with these ORM packages: