Go Restful API Boilerplate

Easily extendible RESTful API boilerplate aiming to follow idiomatic go and best practice.

The goal of this boiler is to have a solid and structured foundation to build upon on.

Features

The following feature set is a minimal selection of typical Web API requirements:

• Configuration using viper
• CLI features using cobra
• PostgreSQL support including migrations using go-pg
• Structured logging with Logrus
• Routing with chi router and middleware
• JWT Authentication using jwt-go in combination with passwordless email authentication (could be easily extended to use passwords instead)
• Request data validation using ozzo-validation
• HTML emails with gomail

Start Application

• Clone this repository
• Create a postgres database and set environment variable DATABASE_URL accordingly if not using same as default
• Build the application: go build to create go-base binary
• Initialize the database and run all migrations found in ./database/migrate with: go-base migrate
• Run the application: go-base serve

API Routes

For passwordless login following routes are available:

Path	Method	Required JSON	Header	Description
/auth/login	POST	email		the email you want to login with (see below)
/auth/token	POST	token		the token you received via email (or printed to stdout if smtp not set)
/auth/refresh	POST		Authorization: "Bearer refresh_token"	refresh JWTs
/auth/logout	POST		Authorizaiton: "Bearer refresh_token"	logout from this device

Besides /auth/* the API provides to main routes /api/* and /admin/* to distinguish between application and administration features. The latter requires to be logged in as administrator by providing the respective JWT in Authorization Header.

Check routes.md file for an overview of the provided API routes.

Client API Access and CORS

The server is configured to serve a Progressive Web App (PWA) client from it's "public" folder. this is where you put the contents of your client's build "dist" folder into. In this case enabling CORS is not required, because the client is served from the same host as the api.

If you want to access the api from a client that is serverd from a different host, including e.g. a development live reloading server, you must enable CORS on the server first by setting an environment variable ENABLE_CORS=true for the server to acceept api connections from clients serverd by other hosts.

Demo client application

For demonstration of the login and account management features this API serves a demo Vue.js PWA. The client's source code can be found here.

If no valid email smtp settings are provided by environment variables, emails will be print to stdout showing the login token. Use one of the following bootstrapped users for login:

• admin@boot.io (has access to admin panel)
• user@boot.io

A deployed version can also be found on Heroku

Environment Variables

Name	Type	Default	Description
PORT	string	localhost:3000	http address (accepts also port number only for heroku compability)
LOG_LEVEL	string	debug	log level
LOG_TEXTLOGGING	bool	false	defaults to json logging
DATABASE_URL	string	postgres://postgres:postgres @localhost:5432/gobase?sslmode=disable	PostgreSQL connection string
AUTH_LOGIN_URL	string	http://localhost:3000/login	client login url as sent in login token email
AUTH_LOGIN_TOKEN_LENGTH	int	8	length of login token
AUTH_LOGIN_TOKEN_EXPIRY	time.Duration	11m	login token expiry
AUTH_JWT_SECRET	string	random	jwt sign and verify key - value "random" creates random 32 char secret at startup (and automatically invalidates existing tokens on app restarts, so during dev you might want to set a fixed value here)
AUTH_JWT_EXPIRY	time.Duration	15m	jwt access token expiry
AUTH_JWT_REFRESH_EXPIRY	time.Duration	1h	jwt refresh token expiry
EMAIL_SMTP_HOST	string		email smtp host (if set and connection can't be established then app exits)
EMAIL_SMTP_PORT	int		email smtp port
EMAIL_SMTP_USER	string		email smtp username
EMAIL_SMTP_PASSWORD	string		email smtp password
EMAIL_FROM_ADDRESS	string		from address used in sending emails
EMAIL_FROM_NAME	string		from name used in sending emails
ENABLE_CORS	bool	false	enable CORS requests

Contributing

Any feedback and pull requests are welcome and highly appreciated. Please open an issue first if you intend to send in a larger pull request or want to add additional features.