Go Backend Template

A simple opinionated Go web app template.

The intention for this project is to work as a template, where the developer should be able to concentrate right away on the business problem and not the usual dev environment and auth wiring. The focus is intentionally on mainly functionality, so the UI is bare-bones.

Features

• Session-based authentication with a sliding expiration
• Argon2 password hashing
• PostgreSQL database
• CORS support
• Request logging middleware
• Native Go HTTP server (no external frameworks)
• HTMX for interactivity

Requirements

• Go 1.24+

• PostgreSQL

• goose for migrations

• sqlc for generating type-safe queries from SQL

• air for live reload (optional)

  go install github.com/pressly/goose/v3/cmd/goose@latest
  go install github.com/sqlc-dev/sqlc/cmd/sqlc@latest
  go install github.com/air-verse/air@latest
  

Setup

1. Run setup (copies .env.example to .env, runs go mod tidy, enables the repo's git hooks which reject commits with unformatted Go files):

   make setup
   

2. Update .env with your database credentials (both the DB_* and GOOSE_* values).

3. Run database migrations:

   make migrate-up
   

4. Run the server:

   make dev   # live reload, or:
   make run
   

Migrations

make migrate-up / make migrate-down / make migrate-status load .env and pass through to goose. Create a new migration with:

make migrate-create name=add_widgets

SQLC

Query codegen is configured in sqlc.yaml (engine postgresql, schema read from migrations/). Add .sql files under internal/database/queries/ and run make generate to emit typed accessors into internal/database/sqlc/.

Database Schema

• user_auth - User accounts with Argon2 password hashes
• user_session - User sessions with SHA-256 hashed token secrets