(Disclaimer: Mango is extremely experimental, so don't whine to me when it eats your children.)

Mango

Mango is a modular web-application framework for Go, inspired by Rack and PEP333.

Overview

Mango is most of all a framework for other modules, and apps. It takes a list of middleware, and an application and compiles them into a single http server object. The middleware and apps are written in a functional style, which keeps everything very self-contained.

Mango aims to make building reusable modules of HTTP functionality as easy as possible by enforcing a simple and unified API for web frameworks, web apps, middleware.

API

As in Rack, the API is very minimal.

Applications are of the form:

func Hello(env mango.Env) (mango.Status, mango.Headers, mango.Body) {
  return 200, mango.Headers{}, mango.Body("Hello World!")
}

Where:

• mango.Env is a map[string]interface{} of the environment
  • It also has accessors for several other environment attributes:
    • mango.Env.Request() is the http.Request object
    • mango.Env.Session() is the map[string]interface for the session (only if using the Sessions middleware)
    • mango.Env.Logger() is the default logger for the app (or your custom logger if using the Logger middleware)
• mango.Status is an integer for the HTTP status code for the response
• mango.Headers is a map[string][]string of the response headers (similar to http.Header)
• mango.Body is a string for the response body

Installation

$ goinstall github.com/paulbellamy/mango

Available Modules

• Sessions

  Usage: mango.Sessions(app_secret, cookie_name, cookie_domain string)

  Basic session management. Provides a mango.Env.Session() helper which returns a map[string]interface{} representing the session. Any data stored in here will be serialized into the response session cookie.

• Logger

  Usage: mango.Logger(custom_logger *log.Logger)

  Provides a way to set a custom log.Logger object for the app. If this middleware is not provided Mango will set up a default logger to os.Stdout for the app to log to.

• ShowErrors

  Usage: mango.ShowErrors(templateString string)

  Catch any panics thrown from the app, and display them in an HTML template. If templateString is "", a default template is used. Not recommended to use the default template in production as it could provide information helpful to attackers.

• Routing

  Usage: mango.Routing(routes map[string]App)

  "routes" is of the form { "/path1(.*)": sub-stack1, "/path2(.*)": sub-stack2 }. It lets us route different requests to different mango sub-stacks based on regexing the path.

• Static

  Usage: mango.Static(directory string)

  Serves static files from the directory provided.

• JSONP

  Usage: mango.JSONP

  Provides JSONP support. If a request has a 'callback' parameter, and your application responds with a Content-Type of "application/json", the JSONP middleware will wrap the response in the callback function and set the Content-Type to "application/javascript".

Example App

package main

import (
  "github.com/paulbellamy/mango"
)

func Hello(env mango.Env) (mango.Status, mango.Headers, mango.Body) {
  env.Logger().Println("Got a", env.Request().Method, "request for", env.Request().RawURL)
  return 200, mango.Headers{}, mango.Body("Hello World!")
}

func main() {
  stack := new(mango.Stack)
  stack.Address = ":3000"
  stack.Middleware(mango.ShowErrors(""))
  stack.Run(Hello)
}

Mango Stacks

Mango revolves around the idea of a "stack", which is a collection of middleware and an application. Stacks can be compiled without being run. When you compile a stack it returns a Mango App which incorporates all of the middleware and the application. We can compile a Mango stack like:

stack := new(mango.Stack)
var compiled mango.App = stack.Compile(Hello)

This compiled stack can be passed to the Routing middleware as a "sub-stack".

Stack can also be compiled into an http.HandlerFunc by calling:

stack := new(mango.Stack)
var listener http.HandlerFunc = stack.HandlerFunc(Hello)

This returns a http.HandlerFunc ready to be passed to http.ListenAndServe, which incorporates the entire Mango stack.

Custom Middleware

Building middleware for Mango is fairly straightforward.

If you build some middleware and think others might find it useful, please let me know so I can include it in the core Mango source. The success of Mango really depends on having excellent middleware packages.

An extremely basic middleware package is simply a function:

func SilenceErrors(env mango.Env, app mango.App) (mango.Status, mango.Headers, mango.Body) {
  // Call our upstream app
  status, headers, body := app(env)

  // If we got an error
  if status == 500 {
    // Silence it!
    status = 200
    headers = mango.Headers{}
    body = "Silence is golden!"
  }

  // Pass the response back to the client
  return status, headers, body
}

To use this middleware we would do:

func main() {
  stack := new(mango.Stack)
  stack.Address = ":3000"

  stack.Middleware(SilenceErrors) // Include our custom middleware

  stack.Run(Hello)
}

For more complex middleware we may want to pass it configuration parameters. An example middleware package is one which will replace any image tags with funny pictures of cats:

func Cats(cat_images []string) mango.Middleware {
  // Initial setup stuff here
  // Done on application setup

  // Initialize our regex for finding image links
  regex := regexp.MustCompile("[^\"']+(.jpg|.png|.gif)")

  // This is our middleware's request handler
  return func(env mango.Env, app mango.App) (mango.Status, mango.Headers, mango.Body) {
    // Call the upstream application
    status, headers, body := app(env)

    // Pick a random cat image
    image_url := cat_images[rand.Int()%len(cat_images)]

    // Substitute in our cat picture
    body = mango.Body(regex.ReplaceAllString(string(body), image_url))

    // Send the modified response onwards
    return status, headers, body
  }
}

This works by building a closure (function) based on the parameters we pass, and returning it as the middleware. Through the magic of closures, the value we pass for cat_images gets built into the function returned.

To use our middleware we would do:

func main() {

  stack := new(mango.Stack)
  stack.Address = ":3000"

  // Initialize our cats middleware with our list of cat_images
  cat_images := []string{"ceiling_cat.jpg", "itteh_bitteh_kittehs.jpg", "monorail_cat.jpg"}
  cats_middleware := Cats(cat_images)

  stack.Middleware(cats_middleware) // Include the Cats middleware in our stack

  stack.Run(Hello)
}

Routing example

The following example routes "/hello" traffic to the hello handler and "/bye" traffic to the bye handler, any other traffic goes to routeNotFound handler returning a 404.

package main

import(
  "github.com/paulbellamy/mango"
  "fmt"
)

func hello(env mango.Env) (mango.Status, mango.Headers, mango.Body) {
  env.Logger().Println("Got a", env.Request().Method, "request for", env.Request().RawURL)
  return 200, mango.Headers{}, mango.Body("Hello World!")
}

func bye(env mango.Env) (mango.Status, mango.Headers, mango.Body) {
  return 200, mango.Headers{}, mango.Body("Bye Bye!")
}

func routeNotFound(env mango.Env) (mango.Status, mango.Headers, mango.Body) {
  return 404, mango.Headers{}, mango.Body("You probably got lost :(")
}

func main() {
  routes := make(map[string]mango.App)
  routes["/hello"] = new(mango.Stack).Compile(hello)
  routes["/bye"] = new(mango.Stack).Compile(bye)

  testServer := new(mango.Stack)
  testServer.Middleware(mango.ShowErrors("<html><body>{Error|html}</body></html>"), mango.Routing(routes))
  testServer.Address = "localhost:3000"
  testServer.Run(routeNotFound)
  fmt.Printf("Running server on: %s\n", testServer.Address)
}

About

Mango was written by Paul Bellamy.

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