go-martini-grunt-skeleton

A skeleton Martini-based Golang web project using Grunt for asset management.

Motivation

Here at Carousell we use Go and Flask to power several of our internal and public facing web projects. While larger web frameworks often have third party libraries such as django-pipeline for Django projects to handle asset management, it can be harder to find such well tested libraries for Go. Furthermore, each of these libraries have their own configuration style which makes it harder for new team members learn.

To overcome this, we have integrated Grunt, a Javascript based task runner which can perform asset management tasks for us regardless of the web framework we use.

grunt-usemin updates references to unminified static assets in templates to actual revisioned assets suitable for deployment to CDNs.

For example,

# templates/index.tmpl

<!-- build:css /css/all.min.css -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/base.css"/>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/main.css"/>
<!-- endbuild -->

will become

# dist/templates/index.tmpl

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/all.min.a12j2.css"/>

Grunt tasks such as cssmin and uglify are used to compress and concatenate static assets. In addition, filenames will be revisioned to avoid issues with CDN caching.

This Grunt based tool can be used on any web projects which uses HTML text templates with minimal changes, which makes it great for our developers as one task runner is usable with all our projects.

Feedbacks are welcome!

What's included and what's not

Included:

• Asset compression and automatic updates of compressed assets filenames in templates
• Grunt tasks for development and build (grunt for dev and grunt build for compressed assets and updated templates)

Not included:

• Asset deployment

Installation

You will need Go >= 1.2 and npm installed. Once done, you can clone this skeleton project:

git clone https://github.com/carousell/go-martini-grunt-skeleton.git

To install the required dependencies for Go, ensure that your GOPATH environment variable is set first.

cd proj
go get .

For grunt dependencies:

npm install -g grunt-cli # if grunt-cli is not installed
npm install

Usage

Development

For day to day development, simply run grunt to start the default go web server using Martini as well as a Grunt watcher which monitors LESS files for changes and compiles them to CSS files.

Production

Run grunt build to concat+minify static assets. Templates updated by usemin will be placed together with the assets in the dist/ directory for you to deploy using your own deployment tools.

License

MIT License, see LICENSE.md.

Copyright Carousell Pte Ltd