Unlike the so-called 'standard go structure', this project is to show that to create a software that adheres on onion architecture in go, you don't need to create a lot of objects and structure.

There are people coming to Go from different backgrounds. The most common people who want to write Go in my experience they came from these backgrounds:

• Java & Spring Boot
• PHP & Laravel
• Ruby on Rails

They have this popular frameworks with a "canonical file structure" that you must adhere coming to Go with no 'one true way' and no 'one true frameworks' is unfamiliar.

When I saw projects on the wild, or when I read the projects from my clients, there are patterns that I recognised. Most of them are trying to fit Go to their familiar framework mental models.

So, I'm sick of seeing a convoluted code that tries to shove object orientation to Go. This is why this project use mostly functions.

This project is not a perfect example of production-grade software. I create this object with these principle in mind:

• Easy to understand and teach.
• Idiomatic. This means that I use Go like it's intended. Use value as much as possible and use patterns like 'accept interface returns value' and avoid things like returning interface.
• High cohesion, low coupling. Things that should be together should be in the same place.
• Sensible dependencies. I have justification why I use the dependencies.
• Sensible defaults. Every configuration has defaults that make the development easy.

This project is as plain as vanilla. I don't use any ORMs and strive to have very minimal dependencies. Heck, this project doesn't have any interface defined. If you see the go.mod file, you'll see that these are the dependies that I use:

require (
	github.com/go-chi/chi/v5 v5.0.8
	github.com/jackc/pgx/v5 v5.4.1
	github.com/oklog/ulid/v2 v2.1.0
	github.com/rs/zerolog v1.29.1
	gopkg.in/guregu/null.v4 v4.0.0
	gopkg.in/yaml.v3 v3.0.1
)

I can explain what's the purpose of the dependencies above, and why I chose those dependencies

1. go-chi is a routing library, it helps parses the request parameters and route the request. The reason I use this library is because it has zero indirect dependencies. Chi is a simple routing library and it does the job well.

2. pgx is a postgresql client. I don't use standard database/sql because usually I want the feature of postgresql that's not available on the lowest common denominator of database driver.

3. ulid is a library to generate and build ULID. I need this because I want the primary key of the domain is lexicographically sorted but also stateless and unique.

4. null is a library that I usually use to avoid nil pointer exception and avoid to use pointer when I can use a value instead. This dependency is optional.

5. yaml is a library to parse yaml file. This is also optional dependencies. If you don't like YAML you can change it to anything you want.

In the root of this project there's a main package that have main.go. This is the place where you put your main program as well as runtime configuration.

Within the root project there are modules implemented as Go package. Package is a boundaries in Go. Everything inside this module is isolated. Inside this module there's no rules on how you organise files. However, in my project, I usually have these:

1. The domain object. This defines the objects which maintain its state and being persisted. In this example it's in the todo_item.go file. Within the project there's todo_item_json.go this is for serialisation only. I prefer to separate the json representation on different file.

2. The repository. This is an abstraction where you can fetch and save your domain objects. I just name it 'repository' because it's somewhat similar to repository pattern but I implemented it as with pure functions in repo.go.

3. The storage. This is just a place where you connect, read, and write on your repository. In this example, it's very simple, it's just a global pool object which represent a connection pool to postgresql instance. It's in the db.go.

4. The read models. This is types and structures to represent portion or aggregation of data from storage. You cannot modify the read models because as name implies, it's for reading.

5. The service. This is a file with functions which define a transaction boundary. This service is agnostic with the protocols. There should be no protocol-related data in here such as HTTP Response Code. Also implemented in pure functions in service.go.

6. The protocols. This is a place where you put the handlers to your requests. I put it on separate package handlers because I don't want to use something like CreateTodoItemHandler and instead I can just use handlers.CreateTodoItem. The implication is that if you have many modules with the same name handlers then you still need to name it. So, you can also put a handlers.go within the directory, so that you can refer it to todo.CreateItemHandler and I think that's better than my approach here. Inside the module there's routes.go. Every routes for this module is here. This will export *chi.Mux object which is implementing chi.Router interface. This isolates any changes to the subrouter to this module. In main.go you can just mount the router.

Note Previously, most of the functions are exported. On this version, I've made functions as private as I can.

Exported functions on each module area as follows:

• SetPool() for setting up the global database connection pool.
• Router() for exporting the chi.Mux object to be mounted.
• The domain object, this is optional. If you want to hide and isolate your domain objects, then you can just make it private

I'm rarely uses mocks. Read the rationale here. I do use fake. The good thing about go it allows build tags which will allow conditional compilation of files. Because I am using files to demarcate boundaries and responsibilities, this works well.

Take a look is the repo.go and repo_fake.go for comparison.

To build or run the program with fake implementation, you can just use --tags parameter, and the fake version will be compiled instead.

go build --tags=fake 

The early version of this program didn't have configuration file and all parameters are being hard-coded. At first I think that's enough. However, I think giving an example of how to implement server who adheres to 12 Factor App rules are important.

See config.go. This file contains code to parse configuration files from two sources: environment variables and configuration files. Configuration files takes precedence. These are the environment variables, configuration file key path and default value.

The default values, if we express it in configuration file is as follows.

listen:
  host: 127.0.0.1
  port: 8080

db:
  db_name: todo
  host: 127.0.0.1
  port: 5432 
  ssl_mode: disable

The program will search for config.yaml on current working directory, or you can pass -c flag to force the program to use your own configuration file name. For example you can run it using something like this:

./mda -c someconfig.yml

This project is a heuristic, not a guide or a 'framework' of structure. It's to show that you can have a sensible code structure and architecture by sticking to the simplicity of Go.

Copyright (c) 2023 Didiet Noor

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   you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
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