Go/React in one file

This repository demonstrates how to embed a React application and a Go web server in a single binary file. The application is named YATA for "Yet Another Todo Application" and it's a simple React SPA coupled to a Go RESTful API with an in-memory database and pre-seeded mock data. You can optionally load and dump a simple JSON file as your database.

This is not production-ready and is somewhat impractical for most real-world uses, but a modern frontend application embedded in a single Go binary like this is just one file to deploy and can effectively serve as a simpler alternative for small applications.

The final bundle is an executable binary weighting ~8 Mb that can be easily built for Windows, Mac or Linux from any platform just by changing the build flags in the ./build.sh script (thank you Go team). A comparable lightweight Docker image or Electron application could easily weight 10-20 times more.

Requirements

• Go 1.22+
• Node 20+

Demo

To see this in action, run these commands

./scripts/build.sh
./bin/app-1.0.0

Flags

• --port accepts a number to declare a different port for the web server
• --jsondb accepts a path to optionally read and write a JSON file with that path, instead of using an in-memory database

Development

• Build the front end first to allow the Go app to compile and embed it

  ./scripts/build-frontend.sh

• Start the backend in live reload mode on port 8080 with WGO (https://github.com/bokwoon95/wgo)

  wgo run -verbose \
    -xdir=frontend \
    -xdir=docs \
    -xdir=scripts \
    -xdir=. \
    -dir=backend \
    ./backend/cmd --port=8080

• Start the backend without live reloading on port 8080

  go run ./backend/cmd --port=8080

• On another terminal, start the front end Vite development server on port 5173

  npm run --prefix=frontend dev

Build

Run one of these scripts

• ./scripts/build.sh: Builds for your current platform
• ./scripts/build-darwin-amd64.sh: Builds for Mac OS with Intel processors
• ./scripts/build-darwin-arm64.sh: Builds for Mac OS with Apple Silicon processors
• ./scripts/build-linux-amd64.sh: Builds for Linux 64 bit
• ./scripts/build-win-amd64.sh: Builds for Windows 64bit
• ./scripts/build-all.sh: Builds for all the above platforms

Resources

• https://github.com/bokwoon95/wgo
• https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.rest-client