17 Golang Packages You Should Know
A curated list of useful Go packages covering a variety of use cases
There are a number of Go frameworks and libraries that the language enthusiasts have built and shared over the course of time.
These packages perform different functions, ranging from development of microservices to making discord bots and all the way to building web applications!
In this article, I will try to familiarize you to a bunch of useful ones that I’ve discovered as I’ve dabbled into getting used to learning and building apps in this new fun programming language.
Note: This is in no way an exhaustive list, but an opinionated list of packages that I prefer and deem interesting to experiment with and want to share with the world. :)
Without further delay, let’s get going and discover some new packages:
Static Website Generation
This is a relatively new territory for a programming language that is usually used to build backend APIs and microservices, thus a slight novelty feels imminent.
Hugo: A great package that lets you build static websites without backend interconnections, all written in Go.
It also boasts to be the fastest static web framework of its kind, with a <1 ms per page load time, and the average site builds in less than a second.
It is designed to work well for any kind of website including blogs and hosted documents. And the best part is that you can host your static sites for free on GitHub pages too!
Installing the Hugo package can be done with a regular homebrew installation, with Docker, and even with the go install command.
Dealing with Config Files
Config files are typically written in various formats like JSON and YAML. Go has a very useful package that makes reading and writing all kind of config file formats a piece of cake.
Viper: This is a complete configuration solution for Go applications including 12-Factor apps. It is designed to work within an app, and can handle all types of configuration needs and formats.
Some neat features from this package include:
reading from JSON, TOML, YAML, HCL, .env, and Java properties config formats
live watching and re-reading of config files
reading from environment variables
Command Line Interfaces
For building CLI apps, Go has a wonderful library that makes it all a breeze.
Cobra: A powerful library for creating Go based CLI applications.
Some great features from this framework include:
It has a powerful integration with the Viper library for config files
It has support for regular subcommands, nested subcommands, and helps in grouping similar commands
Fully POSIX-compliant flags (including short & long versions)
Environment Variables
Go has a number of packages that enable reading .env files that store all kinds of deemed app secrets easier.
One such great library is:
GoDotEnv: It boasts the easiest setup and usage for reading variables from
.envfiles, and is quite lightweight in use too.
Build Automation
Automation tool that aim to help execute tasks with a simple, concise command.
One popular tool that you might already know is the Make command, that helps us use the task automation with Makefiles. A good development practise is to keep a list of commands to execute defined in a Makefile, which we can easily reference later on and execute with simple make commands.
Task: This library boasts more verbosity and thus, slightly better explainability for executing commands than Make. It also has no dependencies and is quite lightweight in comparison.
Active Compilation
Air: This is a great utility Go package that helps rebuild and execute the project’s
main.goon save or virtually any files on save (as we want it) without us typing it out to run it every single time.
Web Development
Here are the top two web frameworks that are regularly maintained:
Gin Web Framework: This is the most popular web development library for Go, and for a number of good reasons.
Iris Web Framework: This is also another option for building high-performance web applications and APIs in Go. If you’ve worked with ExpressJS before, this will feel slightly familiar.
Datetime Management
Carbon: This is a great lightweight, easy to use, and semantically intelligent datetime library for Go developers.
Database ORM
Gorm: This is the easiest to use object relational mapping (ORM) Go library I’ve had the pleasure of using with three major kinds of databases SQLite, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
Microservices
Microservices are typically used in containerized architectures with Docker and Kubernetes to build robust applications. Here are a couple of the Go microservices packages:
Echo: This framework supports RESTful API design and is the most popular Go microservices framework.
go-micro: This library is another great option in the same realm with built-in authentication and data storage designs. Quite handy indeed.
Discord Bots
DiscordGo: This is the most useful API wrapper for the Discord API functions and has a great modular structure with all major discord bot actions you might need.
One small inconvenience is that it still doesn’t have a dedicated documentation with it, but I’ve found over the course of some experimentation with it myself, is that reading the code itself is quite easy with the way it’s neatly separated into modules and packages.
Web Scraping
Colly: This is a wonderful web scraper and crawler framework for Go, especially useful for archiving (which I’ve heavily used it for) and data mining purposes.
Miscellaneous Mentions
Go-redis: This is a great, highly maintained redis database client for Go. It works with both redis 6 and 7 and has a phenomenally easy setup process. Highly recommended.
go-elasticsearch - This is the official Elasticsearch client for Go.
graphql-go: This is an implementation of GraphQL in Go and supports queries, mutations & subscriptions.
Thank you for reading!
I hope this was a helpful introduction to some of the useful libraries in Go.Â
Do mention in a comment if you want me to write an article showcasing the features of any of the above libraries. :)
I will publish an updated version of this article when I encounter new packages worth detailing, so do subscribe below if you want to receive all of my future posts! :)
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