REST Microservices in Go with Gin
Microservices are cool. Simply described, they're a way to take encapsulation to the next level. This design pattern allows for components of your system to be developed in isolation (even in different languages), keep internal business logic truly internal (no more well intentioned hacks that break encapsulation), and allow for each component to be deployed in isolation. These three characteristics go a long way toward making development and deployment easier.
Here's a walk-through of how I designed a simple Todo microservice in Go (with some help from Gin, Gorm, andcodegangsta/cli).
n.b. I'll be walking through the process of building the microservice, but you can get the finished project on github.
Getting Started
First step is to wire up a foundation. For starters, we'll need:
- server cli: This is what we'll run to start up our server.
- service controller: This is where we'll manage our service; wiring up routes and injecting dependencies etc.
- todo api model: A data model shared by the server and the client (and the database) to communicate with.
- todo resource: A grouping of handlers to manage api requests made regarding todos.
- todo http client: An http client library that can be imported by any applications wishing to use our microservice.
- integration tests: By leveraging the client, we can very easily write symmetrical integration tests that fully exercise our service's REST api.
Server CLI
This is the entry point to our app. Right now it's pretty simple because configuration etc. is hard coded in the Service Controller. Eventually it will be in charge of parsing a config and running different aspects of our application (e.g. performing database migrations)
func main() {
// not much here; it'll grow as we externalize config and add options
svc := service.TodoService{}
svc.Run()
}
Service Controller
This is the front controller for our service. We can construct our dependencies to inject into various resources and wire up the routes to different resource functions.
type TodoService struct {
}
func (s *TodoService) Run() {
// we'll pass in configuration later
connectionString := "user:pass@tcp(localhost:3306)/Todo?charset=utf8&parseTime=True"
db, _ := gorm.Open("mysql", connectionString)
// initialize the resource and inject our db connection
todoResource := &TodoResource{db: db}
r := gin.Default()
// to start out, we'll build the ability to add, get, and delete a todo
r.POST("/todo", todoResource.CreateTodo)
r.GET("/todo/:id", todoResource.GetTodo)
r.DELETE("/todo/:id", todoResource.DeleteTodo)
// we'll pass in configuration later
r.Run(":8080")
}
Todo API Model
This structure can be leveraged by both the service, to decode requests and integrate with the database, and by the client, to build and process requests of the service. Later we will put it in its own package so a client implementation can import "api" and "client" and the server only needs "api" and "service"
type Todo struct {
Id int32 `json:"id"`
Created int32 `json:"created"`
Status string `json:"status"`
Title string `json:"title"`
Description string `json:"description"`
}
Todo Resource
This is a very rudimentary first pass at the resource. There is little error handling and there are obvious omissions (like the ability to update a todo), but it illustrates how to group the todo resource's controller functionality and abstract it from the details of bootstrapping the app.
type TodoResource struct {
db gorm.DB
}
func (tr *TodoResource) CreateTodo(c *gin.Context) {
var todo api.Todo
c.Bind(&todo)
todo.Status = api.TodoStatus
todo.Created = int32(time.Now().Unix())
tr.db.Save(&todo)
c.JSON(201, todo)
}
func (tr *TodoResource) GetTodo(c *gin.Context) {
idStr := c.Params.ByName("id")
idInt, _ := strconv.Atoi(idStr)
id := int32(idInt)
var todo api.Todo
if tr.db.First(&todo, id).RecordNotFound() {
c.JSON(404, gin.H{"error": "not found"})
} else {
c.JSON(200, todo)
}
}
func (tr *TodoResource) DeleteTodo(c *gin.Context) {
idStr := c.Params.ByName("id")
idInt, _ := strconv.Atoi(idStr)
id := int32(idInt)
var todo api.Todo
if tr.db.First(&todo, id).RecordNotFound() {
c.JSON(404, gin.H{"error": "not found"})
} else {
tr.db.Delete(&todo)
c.Data(204, "application/json", make([]byte, 0))
}
}
Todo HTTP Client
This enables our other go apps to leverage our service without knowing the details of what the REST API look like. A client application need only import the client and api to be able to treat the service like a local library.
Even if we don't have any go applications lined up to use our service, building the client implementation in conjunction with the service is very helpful for testing the API -- more on that later.
type TodoClient struct {
Host string
}
func (tc *TodoClient) CreateTodo(title string, description string) (api.Todo, error) {
var respTodo api.Todo
todo := api.Todo{Title: title, Description: description}
url := tc.Host + "/todo"
r, err := makeRequest("POST", url, todo)
if err != nil {
return respTodo, err
}
err = processResponseEntity(r, &respTodo, 201)
return respTodo, err
}
func (tc *TodoClient) GetTodo(id int32) (api.Todo, error) {
var respTodo api.Todo
url := tc.Host + "/todo/" + strconv.FormatInt(int64(id), 10)
r, err := makeRequest("GET", url, nil)
if err != nil {
return respTodo, err
}
err = processResponseEntity(r, &respTodo, 200)
return respTodo, err
}
func (tc *TodoClient) DeleteTodo(id int32) error {
url := tc.Host + "/todo/" + strconv.FormatInt(int64(id), 10)
r, err := makeRequest("DELETE", url, nil)
if err != nil {
return err
}
return processResponse(r, 204)
}
The referenced helper functions can be found here
Tests
Of course we need more testing, but here's a start to illustrate how to use the client to test our service. n.b. We will need to have a copy of the server running for them to work.
func TestCreateTodo(t *testing.T) {
// given
client := client.TodoClient{Host: "http://localhost:8080"}
// when
todo, err := client.CreateTodo("foo", "bar")
//then
if err != nil {
t.Error(err)
}
if todo.Title != "foo" && todo.Description != "bar" {
t.Error("returned todo not right")
}
// cleanup
_ = client.DeleteTodo(todo.Id)
}
func TestGetTodo(t *testing.T) {
// given
client := client.TodoClient{Host: "http://localhost:8080"}
todo, _ := client.CreateTodo("foo", "bar")
id := todo.Id
// when
todo, err := client.GetTodo(id)
// then
if err != nil {
t.Error(err)
}
if todo.Title != "foo" && todo.Description != "bar" {
t.Error("returned todo not right")
}
// cleanup
_ = client.DeleteTodo(todo.Id)
}
func TestDeleteTodo(t *testing.T) {
// given
client := client.TodoClient{Host: "http://localhost:8080"}
todo, _ := client.CreateTodo("foo", "bar")
id := todo.Id
// when
err := client.DeleteTodo(id)
// then
if err != nil {
t.Error(err)
}
_, err = client.GetTodo(id)
if err == nil {
t.Error(err)
}
}
Next Steps
Hopefully this shows how easy it is to get started building your own microservice infrastructure in go.
In addition to building out missing functionality, we also need to externalize our configuration and provide a way to manage the database. We also need to organize the components of our app (api, client, and service) into separate packages so that a client application need not import the service code but the api can be shared.
I've published a complete example on github that takes care of these things:
Usage
$ ./cmd/server/server
NAME:
todo - work with the `todo` microservice
USAGE:
todo [global options] command [command options] [arguments...]
VERSION:
0.0.1
COMMANDS:
server Run the http server
migratedb Perform database migrations
help, h Shows a list of commands or help for one command
GLOBAL OPTIONS:
--config, -c 'config.yaml' config file to use
--version, -v print the version
--help, -h show help
Bootstrapping the database
Create an empty database, fill in the supplied config:
config.yaml and then run migratedb to initialize the todo table.mysql -u root -p -e 'Create Database Todo;'
./cmd/server/server --config config.yaml migratedb
Since this command is separate from running your service, you can use a different config (with different database credentials.) Additionally it can perform updates to the table if your todo model expands (just update the
todostructure.)Starting The Server
./cmd/server/server --config config.yaml server
Trying it out
With the server running, you can also try out the example todo cli app included with the project:
$ todo add foo bar
{Id:17 Created:1405039312 Status:todo Title:foo Description:bar}
$ todo add hello world
{Id:18 Created:1405039324 Status:todo Title:hello Description:world}
$ todo ls
{Id:18 Created:1405039324 Status:todo Title:hello Description:world}
{Id:17 Created:1405039312 Status:todo Title:foo Description:bar}
$ todo done 18
{Id:18 Created:1405039324 Status:done Title:hello Description:world}
$ todo ls
{Id:18 Created:1405039324 Status:done Title:hello Description:world}
{Id:17 Created:1405039312 Status:todo Title:foo Description:bar}
(not the prettiest output, I know...)
Some Things To Look At...
Makefile
One update in the github repo is the addition of a Makefile. It takes care of running the server for the tests as well as building both the server binary and an example "todo" cli app that leverages the client (these can be found in the cmddirectory).
CLI API
To support the cli interface with flags and subcommands, I included codegangsta/cli. In addition, I've leveraged Canonical's goyaml to externalize the configuration into a yaml config.
These components aren't by any means necessary for a solid microservice platform, but are a nice start. (Consulintegration might be a nice alternative ;))
GORM
GORM is by no means the ubiquitous choice for database abstraction, but for this simple example it suited my needs. One nice thing about microservices is that one size need not fit all, and we could use something completely different if we had a different problem to solve.
TL;DR
Microservices are cool, and they might be more than a fad. With new technologies like Docker and OpenStack popping up, composing your applications into microservices, which can be scaled and refactored individually, makes increasingly more sense.
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