_content/solutions/webdev.md - website - Git at Google

 ---
 title: "Go for Web Development"
 linkTitle: "Web Development"
 description: "With enhanced memory performance and support for several IDEs, Go powers fast and scalable web applications."
 date: 2019-10-04T15:26:31-04:00
 series: Use Cases
 books:
 icon:
   file: webdev-green.svg
   alt: web dev icon
 iconDark:
   file: webdev-white.svg
   alt: web dev icon
 ---

 ## Overview {#overview .sectionHeading}

 ### Go delivers speed, security, and developer-friendly tools for Web Applications

 Go is designed to enable developers to rapidly develop scalable and secure web applications. Go ships with an easy to use, secure and performant web server and includes it own web templating library. Go has excellent support for all of the latest technologies from [HTTP/2](https://pkg.go.dev/net/http), to databases like [MySQL](https://pkg.go.dev/mod/github.com/go-sql-driver/mysql), [MongoDB](https://pkg.go.dev/mod/go.mongodb.org/mongo-driver) and [Elasticsearch](https://pkg.go.dev/mod/github.com/elastic/go-elasticsearch/v8), to the latest encryption standards including [TLS 1.3](https://pkg.go.dev/crypto/tls). Go web applications run natively on [Google App Engine](https://cloud.google.com/appengine/) and [Google Cloud Run](https://cloud.google.com/run/) (for easy scaling) or on any environment, cloud, or operating system thanks to Go’s extreme portability.

 ## Key Benefits {#key-benefits .sectionHeading}

 ### Deploy across platforms in record speed

 For enterprises, Go is preferred for providing rapid cross-platform deployment. With its goroutines, native compilation, and the URI-based package namespacing, Go code compiles to a single, small binary—with zero dependencies—making it very fast.

 ### Leverage Go’s out-of-the-box performance to scale with ease

 Tigran Bayburtsyan, Co-Founder and CTO at Hexact Inc., summarizes five key reasons his company switched to Go:

 -   **Compiles into a single binary** — “Using static linking, Go actually combining all dependency libraries and modules into one single binary file based on OS type and architecture.”

 -   **Static type system** — “Type system is really important for large scale applications.”

 -   **Performance** — “Go performed better because of its concurrency model and CPU scalability. Whenever we need to process some internal request, we are doing it with separate Goroutines which are 10x cheaper in resources than Python Threads.”

 -   **No need for a web framework** — “In most of the cases you really don’t need any third-party library.”

 -   **Great IDE support and debugging** — “After rewriting all projects to Go, we got 64 percent less code than we had earlier.”


 {{projects `
   - company: Caddy
     url: https://caddyserver.com/
     logoSrc: caddy.svg
     logoSrcDark: caddy.svg
     desc: Caddy 2 is a powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go. Caddy offers greater memory safety than servers written in C. A hardened TLS stack powered by the Go standard library serves a significant portion of all Internet traffic.
     ctas:
       - text: Caddy 2
         url: https://caddyserver.com/
   - company: Cloudflare
     url: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/
     logoSrc: cloudflare-icon.svg
     logoSrcDark: cloudflare-icon.svg
     desc: Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet. “Go is at the heart of CloudFlare’s services including handling compression for high-latency HTTP connections, our entire DNS infrastructure, SSL, load testing and more.”
     ctas:
       - text: Cloudflare and Go
         url: https://blog.cloudflare.com/what-weve-been-doing-with-go/
   - company: gov.uk
     url: https://gov.uk/
     logoSrc: govuk_light.svg
     logoSrcDark: govuk_dark.svg
     desc: The simplicity and safety of the Go language were a good fit for the United Kingdom’s government’s HTTP infrastructure, and some brief experiments with the excellent net/http package convinced web developers they were on the right track. “In particular, Go’s concurrency model makes it absurdly easy to build performant I/O-bound applications.”
     ctas:
       - text: Building a new router for gov.uk
         url: https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2013/12/05/building-a-new-router-for-gov-uk/
       - text: Using Go in government
         url: https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2014/11/14/using-go-in-government/
   - company: Hugo
     url: http://gohugo.io/
     logoSrc: hugo.svg
     logoSrcDark: hugo.svg
     desc: Hugo is a fast and modern website engine written in Go, and designed to make website creation fun again. Websites built with Hugo are extremely fast and secure and can be hosted anywhere without any dependencies.
     ctas:
       - text: Hugo
         url: http://gohugo.io/
   - company: Mattermost
     url: https://mattermost.com/
     logoSrc: mattermost_light.svg
     logoSrcDark: mattermost_dark.svg
     desc: Mattermost is a flexible, open source messaging platform that enables secure team collaboration. It’s written in Go and React.
     ctas:
       - text: Mattermost
         url: https://mattermost.com/
   - company: Medium
     url: https://medium.org/
     logoSrc: medium_light.svg
     logoSrcDark: medium_dark.svg
     desc: Medium uses Go to power their social graph, their image server and several auxiliary services. “We’ve found Go very easy to build, package, and deploy. We like the type-safety without the verbosity and JVM tuning of Java.”
     ctas:
       - text: Medium's Go Services
         url: https://medium.engineering/how-medium-goes-social-b7dbefa6d413
   - company: The Economist
     url: https://economist.com/
     logoSrc: economist.svg
     logoSrcDark: economist.svg
     desc: The Economist needed more flexibility to deliver content to increasingly diverse digital channels. Services written in Go were a key component of the new system that would enable The Economist to deliver scalable, high performing services and quickly iterate new products. “Overall, it was determined that Go was the language best designed for usability and efficiency in a distributed, cloud-based system.”
     ctas:
       - text: The Economist's Go microservices
         url: https://www.infoq.com/articles/golang-the-economist/
 `}}

 ## Get Started {#get-started .sectionHeading}

 ### Go books on web development

 {{books `
   - title: Web Development with Go
     url: https://www.amazon.com/Web-Development-Go-Building-Scalable-ebook/dp/B01JCOC6Z6
     thumbnail: /images/books/web-development-with-go.jpg
   - title: Go Web Programming
     url: https://www.amazon.com/Web-Programming-Sau-Sheong-Chang/dp/1617292567
     thumbnail: /images/books/go-web-programming.jpg
   - title: "Web Development Cookbook: Build full-stack web applications with Go"
     url: https://www.amazon.com/Web-Development-Cookbook-full-stack-applications-ebook/dp/B077TVQ28W
     thumbnail: /images/books/go-web-development-cookbook.jpg
   - title: Building RESTful Web services with Go
     url: https://www.amazon.com/Building-RESTful-Web-services-gracefully-ebook/dp/B072QB8KL1
     thumbnail: /images/books/building-restful-web-services-with-go.jpg
   - title: Mastering Go Web Services
     url: https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Web-Services-Nathan-Kozyra-ebook/dp/B00W5GUKL6
     thumbnail: /images/books/mastering-go-web-services.jpg
 `}}

 {{libraries `
   - title: Web frameworks
     viewMoreUrl: https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=web+framework
     items:
       - text: Buffalo
         url: https://gobuffalo.io/en/
         desc: A framework for rapid web development in Go, curating Go and JS libraries together.
       - text: Echo
         url: https://echo.labstack.com/
         desc: A high performance, extensible, and minimalist Go web framework
       - text: Flamingo
         url: https://www.flamingo.me/
         desc: A fast open-source framework based on Go with clean and scalable architecture
       - text: Gin
         url: https://gin-gonic.com/
         desc: A web framework written in Go, with a martini-like API.
       - text: Gorilla
         url: http://www.gorillatoolkit.org/
         desc: A web toolkit for the Go programming language.
   - title: Routers
     viewMoreUrl: https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=http%20router
     items:
       - text: julienschmidt/httprouter
         url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/julienschmidt/httprouter?tab=overview
         desc: A lightweight high performance HTTP request router
       - text: gorilla/mux
         url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/gorilla/mux?tab=overview
         desc: A powerful HTTP router and URL matcher for building Go web servers with 🦍
       - text: Chi
         url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/go-chi/chi?tab=overview
         desc: A lightweight, idiomatic and composable router for building Go HTTP services.
       - text: net/http
         url: https://pkg.go.dev/net/http
         desc: A standard library HTTP package
   - title: Template Engines
     viewMoreUrl: https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=templates
     items:
       - text: html/template
         url: https://pkg.go.dev/html/template
         desc: A standard library HTML template engine
       - text: flosch/pongo2
         url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/flosch/pongo2?tab=overview
         desc: A Django-syntax like templating-language
   - title: Databases & Drivers
     viewMoreUrl: https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=database%20OR%20sql
     items:
       - text: database/sql
         url: https://pkg.go.dev/database/sql
         desc: A standard library interface with driver support for MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, MS SQL, BigQuery and most SQL databases
       - text: mongo-driver/mongo
         url: https://pkg.go.dev/go.mongodb.org/mongo-driver/mongo?tab=overview
         desc: The MongoDB supported driver for Go
       - text: elastic/go-elasticsearch
         url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/elastic/go-elasticsearch/v8?tab=overview
         desc: An Elasticsearch client for Go
       - text: GORM
         url: https://gorm.io/
         desc: An ORM library for Go
       - text: Bleve
         url: http://blevesearch.com/
         desc: Full-text search and indexing for Go
       - text: CockroachDB
         url: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/
         desc: An evolution of the database—architected for the cloud to deliver resilient, consistent, distributed SQL at scale
   - title: Web Libraries
     viewMoreUrl: https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=web
     items:
       - text: markbates/goth
         url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/markbates/goth?tab=overview
         desc: Authentication for web apps
       - text: jinzhu/gorm
         url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/jinzhu/gorm?tab=overview
         desc: An ORM library for Go
       - text: dgrijalva/jwt-go
         url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/dgrijalva/jwt-go?tab=overview
         desc: A Go implementation of json web tokens
   - title: Other Projects
     items:
       - text: gopherjs
         url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs?tab=overview
         desc: A compiler from Go to JavaScript allowing developers to write front-end code in Go which will run in all browsers.
 `}}

 ### Courses
 * [Learn to Create Web Applications using Go](https://www.usegolang.com), a paid online course

 ### Projects
 *   {{pkg "github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs" "gopherjs"}}, a compiler from Go to JavaScript allowing developers to write front-end code in Go which will run in all browsers.
 *   [Hugo](https://gohugo.io/), The world’s fastest framework for building websites
 *   [Mattermost](https://mattermost.com/), a flexible, open source messaging platform
 that enables secure team collaboration
 *   [Caddy](https://caddyserver.com/), a powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go
	---
	title: "Go for Web Development"
	linkTitle: "Web Development"
	description: "With enhanced memory performance and support for several IDEs, Go powers fast and scalable web applications."
	date: 2019-10-04T15:26:31-04:00
	series: Use Cases
	books:
	icon:
	file: webdev-green.svg
	alt: web dev icon
	iconDark:
	file: webdev-white.svg
	alt: web dev icon
	---

	## Overview {#overview .sectionHeading}

	### Go delivers speed, security, and developer-friendly tools for Web Applications

	Go is designed to enable developers to rapidly develop scalable and secure web applications. Go ships with an easy to use, secure and performant web server and includes it own web templating library. Go has excellent support for all of the latest technologies from [HTTP/2](https://pkg.go.dev/net/http), to databases like [MySQL](https://pkg.go.dev/mod/github.com/go-sql-driver/mysql), [MongoDB](https://pkg.go.dev/mod/go.mongodb.org/mongo-driver) and [Elasticsearch](https://pkg.go.dev/mod/github.com/elastic/go-elasticsearch/v8), to the latest encryption standards including [TLS 1.3](https://pkg.go.dev/crypto/tls). Go web applications run natively on [Google App Engine](https://cloud.google.com/appengine/) and [Google Cloud Run](https://cloud.google.com/run/) (for easy scaling) or on any environment, cloud, or operating system thanks to Go’s extreme portability.

	## Key Benefits {#key-benefits .sectionHeading}

	### Deploy across platforms in record speed

	For enterprises, Go is preferred for providing rapid cross-platform deployment. With its goroutines, native compilation, and the URI-based package namespacing, Go code compiles to a single, small binary—with zero dependencies—making it very fast.

	### Leverage Go’s out-of-the-box performance to scale with ease

	Tigran Bayburtsyan, Co-Founder and CTO at Hexact Inc., summarizes five key reasons his company switched to Go:

	- Compiles into a single binary — “Using static linking, Go actually combining all dependency libraries and modules into one single binary file based on OS type and architecture.”

	- Static type system — “Type system is really important for large scale applications.”

	- Performance — “Go performed better because of its concurrency model and CPU scalability. Whenever we need to process some internal request, we are doing it with separate Goroutines which are 10x cheaper in resources than Python Threads.”

	- No need for a web framework — “In most of the cases you really don’t need any third-party library.”

	- Great IDE support and debugging — “After rewriting all projects to Go, we got 64 percent less code than we had earlier.”


	{{projects `
	- company: Caddy
	url: https://caddyserver.com/
	logoSrc: caddy.svg
	logoSrcDark: caddy.svg
	desc: Caddy 2 is a powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go. Caddy offers greater memory safety than servers written in C. A hardened TLS stack powered by the Go standard library serves a significant portion of all Internet traffic.
	ctas:
	- text: Caddy 2
	url: https://caddyserver.com/
	- company: Cloudflare
	url: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/
	logoSrc: cloudflare-icon.svg
	logoSrcDark: cloudflare-icon.svg
	desc: Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet. “Go is at the heart of CloudFlare’s services including handling compression for high-latency HTTP connections, our entire DNS infrastructure, SSL, load testing and more.”
	ctas:
	- text: Cloudflare and Go
	url: https://blog.cloudflare.com/what-weve-been-doing-with-go/
	- company: gov.uk
	url: https://gov.uk/
	logoSrc: govuk_light.svg
	logoSrcDark: govuk_dark.svg
	desc: The simplicity and safety of the Go language were a good fit for the United Kingdom’s government’s HTTP infrastructure, and some brief experiments with the excellent net/http package convinced web developers they were on the right track. “In particular, Go’s concurrency model makes it absurdly easy to build performant I/O-bound applications.”
	ctas:
	- text: Building a new router for gov.uk
	url: https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2013/12/05/building-a-new-router-for-gov-uk/
	- text: Using Go in government
	url: https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2014/11/14/using-go-in-government/
	- company: Hugo
	url: http://gohugo.io/
	logoSrc: hugo.svg
	logoSrcDark: hugo.svg
	desc: Hugo is a fast and modern website engine written in Go, and designed to make website creation fun again. Websites built with Hugo are extremely fast and secure and can be hosted anywhere without any dependencies.
	ctas:
	- text: Hugo
	url: http://gohugo.io/
	- company: Mattermost
	url: https://mattermost.com/
	logoSrc: mattermost_light.svg
	logoSrcDark: mattermost_dark.svg
	desc: Mattermost is a flexible, open source messaging platform that enables secure team collaboration. It’s written in Go and React.
	ctas:
	- text: Mattermost
	url: https://mattermost.com/
	- company: Medium
	url: https://medium.org/
	logoSrc: medium_light.svg
	logoSrcDark: medium_dark.svg
	desc: Medium uses Go to power their social graph, their image server and several auxiliary services. “We’ve found Go very easy to build, package, and deploy. We like the type-safety without the verbosity and JVM tuning of Java.”
	ctas:
	- text: Medium's Go Services
	url: https://medium.engineering/how-medium-goes-social-b7dbefa6d413
	- company: The Economist
	url: https://economist.com/
	logoSrc: economist.svg
	logoSrcDark: economist.svg
	desc: The Economist needed more flexibility to deliver content to increasingly diverse digital channels. Services written in Go were a key component of the new system that would enable The Economist to deliver scalable, high performing services and quickly iterate new products. “Overall, it was determined that Go was the language best designed for usability and efficiency in a distributed, cloud-based system.”
	ctas:
	- text: The Economist's Go microservices
	url: https://www.infoq.com/articles/golang-the-economist/
	`}}

	## Get Started {#get-started .sectionHeading}

	### Go books on web development

	{{books `
	- title: Web Development with Go
	url: https://www.amazon.com/Web-Development-Go-Building-Scalable-ebook/dp/B01JCOC6Z6
	thumbnail: /images/books/web-development-with-go.jpg
	- title: Go Web Programming
	url: https://www.amazon.com/Web-Programming-Sau-Sheong-Chang/dp/1617292567
	thumbnail: /images/books/go-web-programming.jpg
	- title: "Web Development Cookbook: Build full-stack web applications with Go"
	url: https://www.amazon.com/Web-Development-Cookbook-full-stack-applications-ebook/dp/B077TVQ28W
	thumbnail: /images/books/go-web-development-cookbook.jpg
	- title: Building RESTful Web services with Go
	url: https://www.amazon.com/Building-RESTful-Web-services-gracefully-ebook/dp/B072QB8KL1
	thumbnail: /images/books/building-restful-web-services-with-go.jpg
	- title: Mastering Go Web Services
	url: https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Web-Services-Nathan-Kozyra-ebook/dp/B00W5GUKL6
	thumbnail: /images/books/mastering-go-web-services.jpg
	`}}

	{{libraries `
	- title: Web frameworks
	viewMoreUrl: https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=web+framework
	items:
	- text: Buffalo
	url: https://gobuffalo.io/en/
	desc: A framework for rapid web development in Go, curating Go and JS libraries together.
	- text: Echo
	url: https://echo.labstack.com/
	desc: A high performance, extensible, and minimalist Go web framework
	- text: Flamingo
	url: https://www.flamingo.me/
	desc: A fast open-source framework based on Go with clean and scalable architecture
	- text: Gin
	url: https://gin-gonic.com/
	desc: A web framework written in Go, with a martini-like API.
	- text: Gorilla
	url: http://www.gorillatoolkit.org/
	desc: A web toolkit for the Go programming language.
	- title: Routers
	viewMoreUrl: https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=http%20router
	items:
	- text: julienschmidt/httprouter
	url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/julienschmidt/httprouter?tab=overview
	desc: A lightweight high performance HTTP request router
	- text: gorilla/mux
	url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/gorilla/mux?tab=overview
	desc: A powerful HTTP router and URL matcher for building Go web servers with 🦍
	- text: Chi
	url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/go-chi/chi?tab=overview
	desc: A lightweight, idiomatic and composable router for building Go HTTP services.
	- text: net/http
	url: https://pkg.go.dev/net/http
	desc: A standard library HTTP package
	- title: Template Engines
	viewMoreUrl: https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=templates
	items:
	- text: html/template
	url: https://pkg.go.dev/html/template
	desc: A standard library HTML template engine
	- text: flosch/pongo2
	url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/flosch/pongo2?tab=overview
	desc: A Django-syntax like templating-language
	- title: Databases & Drivers
	viewMoreUrl: https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=database%20OR%20sql
	items:
	- text: database/sql
	url: https://pkg.go.dev/database/sql
	desc: A standard library interface with driver support for MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, MS SQL, BigQuery and most SQL databases
	- text: mongo-driver/mongo
	url: https://pkg.go.dev/go.mongodb.org/mongo-driver/mongo?tab=overview
	desc: The MongoDB supported driver for Go
	- text: elastic/go-elasticsearch
	url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/elastic/go-elasticsearch/v8?tab=overview
	desc: An Elasticsearch client for Go
	- text: GORM
	url: https://gorm.io/
	desc: An ORM library for Go
	- text: Bleve
	url: http://blevesearch.com/
	desc: Full-text search and indexing for Go
	- text: CockroachDB
	url: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/
	desc: An evolution of the database—architected for the cloud to deliver resilient, consistent, distributed SQL at scale
	- title: Web Libraries
	viewMoreUrl: https://pkg.go.dev/search?q=web
	items:
	- text: markbates/goth
	url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/markbates/goth?tab=overview
	desc: Authentication for web apps
	- text: jinzhu/gorm
	url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/jinzhu/gorm?tab=overview
	desc: An ORM library for Go
	- text: dgrijalva/jwt-go
	url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/dgrijalva/jwt-go?tab=overview
	desc: A Go implementation of json web tokens
	- title: Other Projects
	items:
	- text: gopherjs
	url: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs?tab=overview
	desc: A compiler from Go to JavaScript allowing developers to write front-end code in Go which will run in all browsers.
	`}}

	### Courses
	* [Learn to Create Web Applications using Go](https://www.usegolang.com), a paid online course

	### Projects
	* {{pkg "github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs" "gopherjs"}}, a compiler from Go to JavaScript allowing developers to write front-end code in Go which will run in all browsers.
	* [Hugo](https://gohugo.io/), The world’s fastest framework for building websites
	* [Mattermost](https://mattermost.com/), a flexible, open source messaging platform
	that enables secure team collaboration
	* [Caddy](https://caddyserver.com/), a powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go