Snippetbox

This application was developed by following the Let's Go book by Alex Edwards.

It's a full-stack Go web application called Snippetbox that lets people paste and share snippets of text — a bit like GitHub's Gists or Pastebin.

Features

• Save and view snippets.
• Middleware.
• RESTful routing.
• SSL/TLS web server using HTTP 2.0.
• User authentication. User can signup and login.
• Leveled logging.
• Data persistence using MySQL database.
• Dynamic HTML using Go templates
• Session management
• Web security

Development

Software requirements:

• This project supports Go modules. Go 1.13+ is required.
• MySQL
• make

To start the local web server with HTTPS on port 4000:

$ git clone https://github.com/cedrickchee/snippetbox
$ cd snippetbox

# Generate TLS key and cert
$ make cert

$ make dev

To run the tests, run make test.

Dependencies

This project is all based on the standard library. You don't need a framework to build web applications in Go. Go's standard library contains almost all the tools that you need, even for a moderately complex application. The book teaches you to build web applications using the standard library (rather than using a specific framework like Echo, Chi or Gin). A few small external packages are used where it makes sense for security reasons and to reduce complexity.

Recommended Minor Changes

Feel free to carry on playing around with the project and trying to extend it further. You might like to try:

• Adding a new "About" page to the website.
• Increasing code coverage by adding more unit and integration tests.
• Creating an API endpoint which returns a JSON representation of a snippet.
• Adding functionality to confirm a user’s email address on signup.
• Adding functionality for a user to reset their password.
• Creating a command line application under cmd/cli to carry out database admin tasks.

Things I Learned

• Go for web development using just the standard library.
• How to start small and iteratively improve the codebase by refactoring.
• How to structure a project and create testable packages.
• How to create maintainable web applications.
• Basic web security.
• How HTTPS works.