Creating a Microservice in Go

A while back (like, quite a while) I started playing with Go and then unfortunate circumstances kept me from continuing my exploration. My recent exposure to super brilliant people has rekindled some of my desire to explore new languages. Since I’ve been knee-deep in microservices recently, I decided to try and build a microservice in Go.

There are a number of libraries available to Go developers that help with this kind of thing (including Martini). But, I want to see what it looks like to build the most minimal microservice possible. Turns out, that’s pretty damn minimal:

package main

import (
 "encoding/json"
 "net/http"
)

func main() {
 http.HandleFunc("/zombie/", zombie)
 http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
}

type ZombieThing struct {
 Text string
 Name string
 Age int
}

func zombie (w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
  zomb := ZombieThing {"Watch out for this guy!", "Bob Zombie", 12}
  b, err := json.Marshal(zomb)
  if err != nil {
    panic(err)
  }
  w.Write(b)
}

So now I just type go run service.go and the service is running. Now I can just curl the service:

$ curl http://localhost:8080/zombie/
 {"Text":"Watch out for this guy!","Name":"Bob Zombie","Age":12}

If you’re wondering why I used upper-case member names for the JSON object being returned, it’s because I’m lazy. Go considers a variable name with lower case to be private or non-exported, so if I were to make the ZombieThing struct have lowercase names, nothing would be exported and the service would return {}.

So, basically we have yet another example in a long list of examples proving that microservices are a language-agnostic architecture and you can build them in pretty much whatever language and framework that suits your needs.