go-web-app-template

go-web-app-template

This is a template for creating server-side rendered web applications using Go. It is designed to be simple and minimal with no frameworks. It follows as model-view-controller approach.

• Standard library HTTP server with routing
• Middleware using HTTP handlers including recovery and logging, rate limiting
• Handling of forms with simple explicit validation
• Sessions, login and user management with reset tokens, email verification
• CSRF protection, password hashing and password reset
• Flash messages similar to Django
• File uploads with progress tracking
• Integration tests using chromedp

Why? When I start projects, I often have to scaffold a lot of boilerplate code. People argue that's what frameworks are for, but often I need something that's customised down the line. The goal of this template is to provide that initial start with minimal framework overhead.

The only major dependencies I include are for security such as managing user sessions and protecting against CSRF attacks. The rest I try to keep to a minimum.

Getting Started

You can use this template to create a new Go project. Select use this template in Github to get started. To run the server:

go run ./

or using Docker:

docker build -t go-web-app-template .
docker run -p 8080:8080 go-web-app-template

Then navigate to http://localhost:8080 to get redirected to the login page.

Structure

The project is organized to keep concerns separated and code maintainable. Below is the top-level structure:

├── auth/           # Authentication logic (login, signup, password reset)
├── controllers/    # HTTP handlers for different pages and actions
├── email/          # Email sending utilities
├── middleware/     # Custom HTTP middleware (rate limiting, error handling)
├── models/         # Data models (e.g., User)
├── static/         # Static assets (CSS, images)
├── templates/      # HTML templates for rendering views
│   ├── components/ # Reusable template components
│   ├── email/      # Email templates
│   ├── layouts/    # Layout templates
│   └── pages/      # Page templates
├── tests/          # Integration and unit tests
├── utils/          # Utility functions (encoding, password hashing)
├── main.go         # Application entry point

This structure helps you quickly locate code for authentication, page controllers, templates, and utilities. It is designed for extensibility and clarity, making it easy to add new features or pages.

Built with

• env for environment variable based configuration
• gorilla/csrf for CSRF protection
• gorilla/sessions for session management
• gorilla/schema for decoding form values into structs
• lmittmann/tint for coloured logging
• gorm for ORM and database interactions