Setting up a complete RESTful API with westack-go

Jhon Magdalena — Sun, 07 May 2023 09:13:13 +0000

westack-go is a powerful framework that allows you to easily create RESTful APIs in Go. It is designed to be simple, fast, and scalable, making it a great choice for building high traffic applications. In this tutorial, we will walk you through the steps of setting up a complete RESTful API with westack-go.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, make sure you have the following installed on your system:

Go ^1.20
MongoDB ^4.0

Installing westack-go

To get started, create a new directory for your project and initialize a new Go module:

mkdir westack-go-example
cd westack-go-example
# Initialize the go project first
go mod init westack-go-example

Next, install westack-go using the following command:

go install github.com/fredyk/westack-go@v1.6

And finally, initialize the westack-go project:

westack-go init .

Updating the Data Source File

westack-go uses the server/datasources.json file to manage data sources. In this tutorial, we'll be using MongoDB as our database. Once you run the init subcommand, your datasources.json file will be something like this:

{
  "db": {
    "connector": "mongodb",
    "name": "db",
    "url": "mongodb://localhost:27017",
    "database": "westack_go_example",
    "user": "",
    "password": ""
  }
}

This configuration tells westack-go to connect to a MongoDB server running on localhost:27017 and use a database named westack_go_example.

Creating the models

Models are the representations of the data structures that are going to be used in the API. They define the attributes that are going to be stored, their types, relationships with other models and permissions.

The models are defined in JSON format and are loaded by the westack-go framework at runtime. This approach provides a lot of flexibility, as it allows you to define the data structure separately from the code that manipulates it, and also makes it easier to change the structure without modifying the code.

Here, we are adding a model named Note:

# Usage: westack-go model add <model_name> <datasource_name>
#   <datasource_name> defaults to "db" when you run `westack-go init .`

westack-go model add Note db

Because of the framework being highly oriented to security, any generated model won't allow any read or write operation without being authenticated at runtime.
In this case, we will skip authentication for create and read-type operations (findMany, findById and count) in our Note model, by setting proper Casbin policies in the Note.json file:

{
  "name": "Note",
  "base": "PersistedModel",
  "public": true,
  "casbin": {
    "policies": [
      "$everyone,*,create,allow",
      "$everyone,*,read,allow"
    ]
  }
}

Setting up our launcher

To start the server, add the following code to your main.go file:

package main

import (
    "github.com/fredyk/westack-go/westack"
    "github.com/gofiber/fiber/v2"
    "log"
)

func main() {

    // Instantiate a new WeStack app
    app := westack.New()

    // Boot the app with a custom boot function
    app.Boot(func(app *westack.WeStack) {

        // Add a custom route
        app.Server.Get("/status", func(c *fiber.Ctx) error {
            return c.JSON(fiber.Map{"status": "ok"})
        })

    })

    // Start the app
    log.Fatal(app.Start())

}

The default listen port will be 8023. You can change it in the server/config.json file:

{
  "name": "westack-go-example",
  "restApiRoot": "/api/v1",
  "port": 8023
}

You can also override it with the environment variable PORT=8023

Starting the server

To start the server, you need to specify two required environment variables, and then just start

# (Please be sure to change both user and password)
export WST_ADMIN_USERNAME=myadminusername
export WST_ADMIN_PWD=myadminpassword

# Run the server:
go run main.go

If everything went well, it will output something like this:

And a Swagger-UI will be generated and available at http://localhost:8023/swagger

Testing it

Let's create an anonymous note:

Response body:

{
  "body": "This is an anonymous note",
  "created": "2023-05-07T16:29:23.661+02:00",
  "id": "6457b5c3fd9839449f0cc6f4",
  "modified": "2023-05-07T16:29:23.661+02:00",
  "title": "My first note"
}

And now let's confirm that the note was created with a simple GET /api/v1/notes request to find all notes:

Summary

In this post, we've covered how to set up a complete RESTful API with westack-go in less than 10 minutes. westack-go is a powerful framework that can save you a lot of time and effort in building your next Go project. With its built-in ORM, automatic route generation, and middleware support, you can quickly create a scalable and maintainable API without having to write a lot of boilerplate code.

westack-go is a relatively new framework, but current contributors do their best to improve and extend its features, and we are hoping to grow our staff soon. If you're interested in learning more about westack-go, you can check out the official documentation on Github or join the community on Discord.

We hope you found this tutorial helpful and that it helps you get started with building your next API with westack-go!

Forem: Jhon Magdalena