Boilerplating a New Go Program (Microservice)

I lead a team that is responsible for anywhere from 15-25 Go microservices at any given time. We are constantly creating new services and libraries, so it’s become important to streamline the boilerplating process. I’m mostly writing this article for myself as a kind of self-documentation, but hopefully, you’ll find it useful as you create new Go projects for yourself.

I’ve certainly found it useful in spinning up side projects like the Qvault app.

Step 1 – Create a Remote Repo and Clone It

I’m a sucker for the GOPATH. Even though it’s no longer necessary, I find the single workspace principle neat and orderly. As such, I keep all my projects in:

~/go/src/REMOTE/NAMESPACE/PROJECT

The fastest way to start a new project is to hop into Github, Gitlab, or wherever my source control is located and create a new project with the default README. Then I can simply pull it down using go get and my remote Git connection is already setup. For example:

go get github.com/qvault/webapp

As long as that command is run outside of an existing go module, the source code is cloned to the proper location in your GOPATH.

Step 2 – Folder Structure

After running cd into our new project, we create an internal directory that will store packages that are meant to be scoped to this project. It will usually contain packages like database, kafka, bayesian, etc. If you didn’t know, the [internal](https://qvault.io/2020/03/29/how-to-separate-library-packages-in-go/) directory is a Go convention, and doesn’t allow the Go compiler to accidentally use its packages in an external project.

Next, we create a cmd folder where we will store all the executable main packages that will be built at compile time. Each executable will have its own directory in cmd.

We also need a Makefile that will automatically build all the executables in cmd, run tests, do linting etc. It looks something like this:

test:
	go test ./...

vet:
	go vet ./...

lint:
	test -z $(gofmt -l internal cmd)

build:
	go build ./cmd/api

clean:
	rm api

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