Bakersfield Technology Go Rewrite

I originally built the 2-page bakersfieldtechnology.com website in 2021 using Next.js. Years later when I wanted to learn Templ and the Echo framework, rebuilding the website in Go seemed like a great learning opportunity.

On the frontend, the site uses Tailwind & Scss for styles, TypeScript for interactivity, and Vite for bundling. When running a production build, the assets are compiled into the binary using //go:embed tags. The work I did building the Vite integration on this app also spun out into its own blog post.

You can view the repo for the original Next.js-powered site here.

Developing

You'll need the following on your system to build this app:

• Go (Installation guide)
• Templ CLI (Installation guide)
• Air (Installation guide)
• Node/NPM (Installation guide)

After cloning the repo, run the following commands:

go mod tidy
npm install

To build the assets during development, run the following command:

npm run dev

You can start the Go app with live reloading using the following command:

air

The Templ watcher has issues at the time of development, but once they are resolved the watcher can be run with the following command:

templ generate --watch --proxy="http://localhost:3005" --cmd="go run ."

Building locally

To build the project for the local machine, run the following command:

npm run build && templ generate && go build -o bakersfieldtechnology.com

Building for production

To build the project for the production x86 Linux server, run the following command:

npm run build && templ generate && GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build -o bakersfieldtechnology.com

You'll find a unit file and Caddyfile for the server in the deployment/ directory of this project. The unit file will require some modification to tailor it to the particular server.

Router

I'm using Echo for routing on this project because I want to try something I haven't used, Echo's error handling looks simpler than net/http-compatible libraries, it has comprehensive docs, and Primeagen uses it in his Go repos 🤷‍♂️

For posterity, I'm including a list of all the routers I evaluated for this project below.

• Echo Zero dynamic allocation router. Best docs. Not net/http compatible, but has simpler error handling story.
• Chi. ~1000 lines of code. Compatible with net/http. No external dependencies.
• Gorilla Mux. Very popular. Compatible with net/http.
• Gin. Claims to be the fastest router. Zero allocations. Docs leave a lot to be desired.

Build tag gopls support

The gopls support for mutually exclusive build tags isn't great. Read more here.

Build tags in Neovim

I'm not sure exactly how to make gopls work with Go build tags in Neovim, but maybe when I understand a little bit more about Neovim this Discourse dicussion will make more sense.