Table of contents

1. Why this project?
2. Running backend locally
3. File structure
4. Models
5. Controllers
6. Routes

Why this project?

Conduit or realworld is a project on GitHub which allows people to learn new stacks and technologies. It helps people to learn and deploy same project in different frameworks. I wanted to learn Go for quite a while now, and hence started with this project.

This project will give up an idea about the following concepts

• File structure in Go
• REST APIs in Go
• Connecting to MongoDB in Go
• Creating REST APIs in Go, with real time data
• working with JWT in Go
• Authentication and authorization in Go

Running Backend Locally

Make sure you have the following tools installed/ready

• Go Programming Language
• .env
  • MONGODB_CONNECTION_STRING
  • DATABASE_NAME

Enter command go run main.go this should probably start the server locally You are then good to make the API calls using the following routes

This is one of the first project that I took after going over the basics of Go. I am learning, please let me know the places where things are over complicated, and places where wrong patters are used.

Testing locally on Postman

Creating a user

[POST] : localhost:4000/api/users
 
Body
Raw (JSON):
{
    "name" : "rajma chawal",
    "username" : "rajmaaaaa",
    "password" : "12345"
}

Header
Authorization : Bearer <YOUR BEARER TOKEN>

Similarly you can make other requests using this example

File structure

|__Conduit_backend
   |__app
	   |__Controllers
	   |__Database
	   |__models
	   |__Routes
   |__.env
   |__main.go

Let's break down these files into simpler modules

The parent folder is conduit_backend

main.go

Main.go is the entry point of every go project, it is created once we run the command go mod init main.go . our main.go file is responsible for

• Call the functions in the database folder that creates a connection with the database
• Create a Router which starts a local server.
• This port number is something that could cause deployment issues, this is something I faces, but using 3000 on heroku worked fine for me.

App

The App folder contains the major folders required to implement the backend such as

• Controllers
  • This folder contains out business logic
• Models
  • This folder contains the files which creates different interfaces in Go
• Routes
  • This folder contains a file which creates a router using mux router, which is a package in go used to create routers.
• Database
  • As the name suggets this folder is used to connect with the database, which is MongoDB in our case.

Controllers

We use the following packages here, and most of the code crunching is done in this folder

• Mongo - to perform mongodb operations
• godotenv - accessing env variables
• bson - working with JSON data

Divided in to 3 parts

• Articles
• Auth
• users Each folder works on respective operations

Models

This directory is crucial to create interfaces, and validating them Example of an Interface

type User struct {
    ID        primitive.ObjectID `json:"_id,omitempty" bson:"_id,omitempty"`
    Name      string             `json:name`
    UserName  string             `json:username`
    Password  string             `json:password`
    Followers []string           `json:followers`
    Following []string           `json:following`
    Articles  []string           `json:articles`
}

Routes

Controllers are imported in this file

import (
    "github.com/gorilla/mux"
    articleController "github.com/deepakr-28/conduit_golang_backend/app/controllers/articles"
    userController "github.com/deepakr-28/conduit_golang_backend/app/controllers/users"
)

Following routes are currently present in the project

// User Routes

POST: /api/users // CREATE USER
POST: /api/users/login // LOGIN USER
GET:  /api/user //GET USER
PUT:  /api/user //UPDATE USER
GET:  /api/profiles/{username} //GET USER INFO
POST: /api/profiles/{username}/follow // LIKE USER
POST: /api/profiles/{username}/follow // FOLLOW USER

// Article Routes
POST: /api/articles // NEW ARTICLE
GET: /api/articles/{slug} //GET ARTICLE
DELETE: /api/articles/{slug} // DELETE ARTICLE