Go & Vue.js - Demo Web Application

This is a simple web application with a Go server/backend and a Vue.js SPA (Single Page Application) frontend.

The app has been designed with cloud native demos & containers in mind, in order to provide a real working application for deployment, something more than "hello-world" but with the minimum of pre-reqs. It is not intended as a complete example of a fully functioning architecture or complex software design.

Typical uses would be deployment to Kubernetes, demos of Docker, CI/CD (build pipelines are provided), deployment to cloud (Azure) monitoring, auto-scaling

• The SPA component was created using the Vue CLI and uses Bootstrap-Vue and Font Awesome. In addition Gauge.js is used for the dials in the monitoring view
• The Go component is a vanilla Go HTTP server using gopsutils for monitoring metrics, and Gorilla Mux for routing

Repo Structure

/
├── spa            Root of the Vue.js project
│   └── src        Vue.js source code
├── azure          Supporting files for Azure deployment etc
└── server         Go backend server
    └── vendor     Vendor libraries used by the server 

Server API

The Go server component performs two tasks

• Serve the Vue.js app to the user. As this is a SPA, this is static content, i.e. HTML, JS & CSS files and any images. Note. The Vue.js app needs to be 'built' before it can be served, this bundles everything up correctly
• Provide a simple REST API for data to be displayed & rendered by the Vue.js app. This API is very simple currently has two routes:
  • GET /api/info - Returns system information and various properties as JSON
  • GET /api/metrics - Returns monitoring metrics for CPU, memory, disk and network. This data comes from the gopsutils library
  • GET /api/weather - Returns weather data for the location determined automatically from the calling IP address, uses IPStack and DarkSky REST APIs

Building & Running Locally

1. Pre-reqs

• Install Node.js
• Install Vue CLI
• You will need Go v1.12+ installed and configured.
• Once Go v1.12+ is installed, also make sure you have the GOPATH environmental variable set up
• Clone the project to any directory where you do development work

git clone https://github.com/benc-uk/vuego-demoapp.git

2. Building the Vue.js SPA

To build and bundle the SPA run the following. This will output the resulting app (HTML, CSS, JS, assets, etc) to spa/dist

cd spa
npm install
npm run build

3. Building the Go server

To build the Go server component run the following. This will create an executable called server or server.exe

cd server
go build

4. Running the combined app

To start the app, launch the server exe and pass the directory containing the content you wish to serve as a command line parameter. The server will listen on port 4000 by default, change this by setting the environmental variable PORT

cd server
./server ../spa/dist

Then access http://localhost:4000/

Notes on running locally

• You can run the Vue.js app standalone with by running npm run serve, this will start a dev server on port 8080. This will serve the app content and will auto reload when code changes. However the API endpoint will not be available so the 'Sys Info' & 'Monitor' pages will not receive any data
• During development you can run the Go server directly without building the exe, by running go run *.go or go run *.go ../spa/dist

Containers

Public Docker image is available on Dockerhub

Run with docker run -d -p 4000:4000 bencuk/vuego-demoapp

Config Environmental Variables

• WEATHER_API_KEY - Enable the weather feature with a DarkSky API key
• IPSTACK_API_KEY - Enable the weather feature with a IPStack API key

Application Insights

Waiting for golang support

GitHub Actions CI/CD

A working CI and release GitHub Actions workflow is provided .github/workflows/build-deploy-aks.yml, automated builds are run in GitHub hosted runners

GitHub Actions

Azure Templates

Templates for deployment to Azure with "quick deploy" buttons are here

Updates

When	What
April 2018	Project created
July 2018	Updated Vue CLI config & moved to Golang 1.11
Sept 2018	Updated with weather API and weather view
Sept 2019	New release pipelines and config moved to env vars
Dec 2019	Github Actions and AKS