Go for Web Development - The Go Programming Language

Overview

Go delivers speed, security, and developer-friendly tools for Web Applications

Go is designed to enable developers to rapidly develop scalable and secure web applications. Go ships with an easy to use, secure and performant web server and includes it own web templating library. Go has excellent support for all of the latest technologies from HTTP/2, to databases like MySQL, MongoDB and Elasticsearch, to the latest encryption standards including TLS 1.3. Go web applications run natively on Google App Engine and Google Cloud Run (for easy scaling) or on any environment, cloud, or operating system thanks to Go’s extreme portability.

Key Benefits

Deploy across platforms in record speed

For enterprises, Go is preferred for providing rapid cross-platform deployment. With its goroutines, native compilation, and the URI-based package namespacing, Go code compiles to a single, small binary—with zero dependencies—making it very fast.

Leverage Go’s out-of-the-box performance to scale with ease

Tigran Bayburtsyan, Co-Founder and CTO at Hexact Inc., summarizes five key reasons his company switched to Go:

Compiles into a single binary — “Using static linking, Go actually combining all dependency libraries and modules into one single binary file based on OS type and architecture.”
Static type system — “Type system is really important for large scale applications.”
Performance — “Go performed better because of its concurrency model and CPU scalability. Whenever we need to process some internal request, we are doing it with separate Goroutines which are 10x cheaper in resources than Python Threads.”
No need for a web framework — “In most of the cases you really don’t need any third-party library.”
Great IDE support and debugging — “After rewriting all projects to Go, we got 64 percent less code than we had earlier.”

Featured users

Customer	Brief introduction	Projects using go
	Caddy 2 is a powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go. Caddy offers greater memory safety than servers written in C. A hardened TLS stack powered by the Go standard library serves a significant portion of all Internet traffic.	Caddy 2
	Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet. “Go is at the heart of CloudFlare’s services including handling compression for high-latency HTTP connections, our entire DNS infrastructure, SSL, load testing and more.”	Cloudflare and Go
	The simplicity and safety of the Go language were a good fit for the United Kingdom’s government’s HTTP infrastructure, and some brief experiments with the excellent net/http package convinced web developers they were on the right track. “In particular, Go’s concurrency model makes it absurdly easy to build performant I/O-bound applications.”	Building a new router for gov.uk Using Go in government
	Hugo is a fast and modern website engine written in Go, and designed to make website creation fun again. Websites built with Hugo are extremely fast and secure and can be hosted anywhere without any dependencies.	Hugo
	Mattermost is a flexible, open source messaging platform that enables secure team collaboration. It’s written in Go and React.	Mattermost
	Medium uses Go to power their social graph, their image server and several auxiliary services. “We’ve found Go very easy to build, package, and deploy. We like the type-safety without the verbosity and JVM tuning of Java.”	Medium's Go Services
	The Economist needed more flexibility to deliver content to increasingly diverse digital channels. Services written in Go were a key component of the new system that would enable The Economist to deliver scalable, high performing services and quickly iterate new products. “Overall, it was determined that Go was the language best designed for usability and efficiency in a distributed, cloud-based system.”	The Economist's Go microservices

Get Started

Go books on web development

Web frameworks

Echo
A high performance, extensible, and minimalist Go web framework
Flamingo
A fast open-source framework based on Go with clean and scalable architecture
Gin
A web framework written in Go, with a martini-like API.
Gorilla
A web toolkit for the Go programming language.

Routers

net/http
A standard library HTTP package
julienschmidt/httprouter
A lightweight high performance HTTP request router
gorilla/mux
A powerful HTTP router and URL matcher for building Go web servers with 🦍
Chi
A lightweight, idiomatic and composable router for building Go HTTP services.

Template Engines

html/template
A standard library HTML template engine
flosch/pongo2
A Django-syntax like templating-language

Databases & Drivers

database/sql
A standard library interface with driver support for MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, MS SQL, BigQuery and most SQL databases
mongo-driver/mongo
The MongoDB supported driver for Go
elastic/go-elasticsearch
An Elasticsearch client for Go
GORM
An ORM library for Go
Bleve
Full-text search and indexing for Go
CockroachDB
An evolution of the database—architected for the cloud to deliver resilient, consistent, distributed SQL at scale

Web Libraries

markbates/goth
Authentication for web apps
jinzhu/gorm
An ORM library for Go
dgrijalva/jwt-go
A Go implementation of json web tokens

Other Projects

gopherjs
A compiler from Go to JavaScript allowing developers to write front-end code in Go which will run in all browsers.

Courses

Learn to Create Web Applications using Go, a paid online course

Projects

gopherjs, a compiler from Go to JavaScript allowing developers to write front-end code in Go which will run in all browsers.
Hugo, The world’s fastest framework for building websites
Mattermost, a flexible, open source messaging platform that enables secure team collaboration
Caddy, a powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go