top | item 31958823

Show HN: Copper – A Go framework for your projects

146 points| tusharsoni | 3 years ago |github.com

Hey HN! I've been working with Go for the last 5+ years at large-ish companies building products that many of you may use regularly.

A ton of people say that Go's standard library is really powerful and usually enough to get by without external dependencies. I think that's true for companies that have the resources to build and maintain packages to reduce code duplication. For everyone else, we're left to finding the right set of packages to build our projects. So, I built Copper - a toolkit that helps you get your project off the ground with minimal dependencies. It covers everything from routing, html, storage to tooling and more.

Check it out, star it, and feel free to ask questions!

P.S. I also have a video demo building an HN clone in the docs

[1] https://gocopper.dev/

80 comments

matthewmueller|3 years ago

Author of https://github.com/livebud/bud here, congrats on the launch Tushar! Looking forward to building up the Go web framework ecosystem with you!

tusharsoni|3 years ago

Thank you, so much to do in this space! Bud looks great and I see we share many common goals. The dependency injection piece looks interesting. Did you build it custom or integrated an existing solution?

theplumber|3 years ago

Am I do only one who hates frameworks that need a cli to get started?

tusharsoni|3 years ago

ha, add me to that list :) I think it's fine if CLIs are optional and I've tried to do that with Copper. Of course, your initial setup will be longer without scaffolding so it's not a great first time developer experience

EToS|3 years ago

Me too, although if its a lightweight helper you can ditch down the line its normally not an issue

mstef9|3 years ago

Devs interested in this may also be interested in Pagoda [1], a rapid, easy full-stack web development starter kit in Go that I wrote. It leverages popular frameworks and modules that you can easily swap out, if desired. The readme contains full documentation and it's very much batteries-included.

[1] https://github.com/mikestefanello/pagoda

hdra|3 years ago

just wanted to say i really like the approach of a "template/starter" that you took. My team isn't starting a new project anytime soon to really make full use of it, but we have pretty much adopted the pagoda service container approach in our home-grown "framework".

telesoft|3 years ago

Cool project. I'm currently building something similar to hacker news using only the standard library. How could this project help me?

The way I use the standard library is like a super condensed version of React. Templates are my components. Since templates can be nested, templates can be used to build "components" and those components can be stored in separate files and compiled together at run time with a "model" being fed to the template(s) via a state object passed by the application.

So I may have a few dozen template files in a folder called /components, and another folder called /pages with a few templates that use these components. When a user visits a "page", the template file is "compiled" with the appropriate components.

A page might look like this:

  <html>
    {{template "nav"}}
    {{template "thread" .Thread}}
    {{template "footer"}}
  </html>

And "nav", "thread", and "footer" are all components defined in another file. This allows for re-use across multiple pages.

I want to do a write-up on it but I'm not sure if it's a novel idea.

tusharsoni|3 years ago

Oh that's fun! In my demo video [1], I build a (minimal) HN clone so hopefully that answers your question in detail.

But the tldr is - you'll need a lot more than just templating for a production ready app. To name a few things - server, storage, migrations, logging, configs. IMO there's a huge benefit in having a batteries included toolkit that stays close to the stdlib - so you can totally keep your templates as is!

[1] https://vimeo.com/723537998

morelisp|3 years ago

In what sense is this like React? Incremental re-rendering using html/template or text/template was virtually impossible last time I looked into it (for improving performance of some report generation), let alone getting any kind of DOM tree structure out.

skinnyarms|3 years ago

Sounds like old school server-side rendering techniques to me: php, coldfusion, classic ASP

jjtheblunt|3 years ago

Doesn't the Go standard library do what you mentioned above?

tusharsoni|3 years ago

It kinda does but there's a lot of boilerplate that goes in before we actually get to the app logic. And, understandably, there's no structure provided by the Go stdlib. Once I made many projects with just using stdlib, I started taking common packages out. And Copper is essentially that. I can start writing my app code with minimal setup / boilerplate.

atwood22|3 years ago

Go’s HTTP routing is very primitive. That’s one big area that I’ve always needed to use a 3rd party dependency. The main issue is that it doesn’t support placeholder values in route paths.

icod1|3 years ago

Reading through the comments, most of you are either new to Go or new to web dev in general. Only that would explain how this SHITSHOW of a "framework" would get any praise at all.

What he copy/pasted already exists, only better.

The HN audience doesn't seem very sophisticaed. Hell even reddit's /r/golang is better informed than HN in this regard. Just read through all the issues people have with gorm and if you've ever did any real Go development you would not pick gorm as the default database package in the first place.

Amateurs all of you, I'm seriously sick of your unprofessional lack of knowledge and experience.

HackerNews my ass, more like NoobNews. GTFO

thiht|3 years ago

Too bad it uses Wire. There’s absolutely no need for dependency injection frameworks in Go, you can just inject directly to receiver functions. It does the same thing without the crappy indirection added by this kind of frameworks.

bestinterest|3 years ago

So many frameworks in other languages are trying to get to the productivity of Rails but they just don't have the same spark imo.

There is no Rails equivalent in JS, theres lots of competitors that feel years away like SailsJS, the new Deno Fresh one etc, Adonisjs... Is NextJS/SvelteKit/RemixRun considered also? I don't even know if they have a standardised background job processor in JS land.

Java's solutions are dreadful imo for if you want to compare to Rails. Quarkus/SpringBoot/Micronaut are nowhere near productivity levels for a fullstack app. They lean heavily on the API only side of things. (I do like Java oddly enough)

PHP is the main competitor to Rails oddly enough, Laravel seems brilliant.

Go is just starting up in this space it looks like, Bud is another attempt at Rails in another language https://github.com/livebud/bud. However the Go ecosystem is heavily API only side of things instead of SSR. Go's templating libs suck imo.

Elixir of course has Phoneix which is apparently great, purely functional langs unfortunately dont fit my head and feel to abstract for myself (don't hate me)

Its no wonder we have the backend / frontend developer split nowadays.

swagonomixxx|3 years ago

Building a "Rails-like" framework in Go is honestly totally antithetical to the "Go way" of doing things.

Rails has a ton of magic, implicit behaviours, monkey patching, ERB, and so on.

Go is a touch below Java verbose, explicit, no magic, every function call can be very easily traced without having to do meta programming and code generation in your head to understand what's going on.

In my 8 years of writing Go, I would liken it the most to C, where you had to spell everything out, except without the manual memory management and the macro preprocessor.

Doing magic with Go via reflection or other implicit behaviours is generally annoying to deal with. One example is some libraries using struct tags, most of the time they work as expected, but sometimes you get some weird failure and these kinds of implicit behaviours are the culprit.

Overall, I don't rate these "all in one" frameworks highly in Go. The standard library is excellent for most applications, you only need to add some code to remove some boilerplate. For most apps that I have worked on in Go that involved web components, we maybe had to import e.g a websockets library or a more elegant routing library, but that's pretty much it.

tusharsoni|3 years ago

This is a good observation. One trend I'm noticing is that the "old way" (PHP, Rails, etc.) of doing things is making a comeback. Go is very well positioned for this but lacks the frameworks.

I'm hoping to add something like Phoenix to Copper. It should help with the "heavily API only side" problem. I've already added integrations for Tailwind and added some utilities on top of the templating (going to add more) to fix the lack of good templating.

matthewmueller|3 years ago

Bud author here, thanks for including Bud on your list. That's a really good overview of the landscape!

My take is that Remix + Next.js + SvelteKit are going to continue to innovate fast in the Frontend and "Backend for Frontend" space. Rails and Laravel don't hold a candle to the experience you get in that ecosystem.

But the JS ecosystem is massive and, as a result, fragmented. As you mentioned, there's no consensus on ORMs, mailers, queues, etc.

I don't see those frameworks trying to push too far in that direction, they'll remain "UI focused". This is nice for their focus, but not great for someone who wants to launch a web app and doesn't want to figure out all the surrounding ecosystem tooling.

This is where Laravel, Rails (and soon Bud) (and I assume Copper) will shine. They provide more tools and interfaces out of the box for building full-featured backends. These frameworks definitely need to keep an eye on the best ideas coming out of the JS framework ecosystem though!

rubyist5eva|3 years ago

A rails-like framework will never happen in a language that doesn’t have the same meta programming capabilities as Ruby. Rails exists because Ruby exists not because DHH just happened to be a Ruby programmer. There is a reason people have tried to recreate it in other languages and it always feels jank - because Rails is designed specifically and enabled by the Ruby language.

andreygrehov|3 years ago

Congrats!

> One Binary

> Build frontend apps along with your backend and ship everything in a single binary.

I'm doing something similar and love it. Do you embed the entire `public` directory and then traverse the embed.FS to access the files in memory?

capableweb|3 years ago

> I'm doing something similar and love it. Do you embed the entire `public` directory and then traverse the embed.FS to access the files in memory?

I've done this in Rust before, I'm sharing it here as I'm assuming that Go has something similar.

I'm basically hard-coding the paths in the backend to also serve static assets, and embed the bytes of the asset at compile time, so when it runs, it's just serving it straight from memory. Here how it looks for style.css for example: https://codeberg.org/ditzes/ditzes/src/branch/master/src-tau...

It'd be trivial to move the structure to something like a map instead, where the URL is the key and another map where bytes, headers and such is stored. Mostly I didn't, because I'm just embedding few amount of files.

tusharsoni|3 years ago

Thank you! Go supports embedding static files natively [1]. Copper builds on top of it and provides the tooling to do it seamlessly for web projects.

[1]: https://pkg.go.dev/embed

binwiederhier|3 years ago

embed.FS is really cool. If you wanna see what it looks like, check out how I build ntfy [0]. It ships with the docs (built from mkdocs, see [1]) and the React web app [2] all in a single binary.

Here are the embed statements [3]. One thing to note is that embed.FS does not send 304 Not Modified status back, which is why I made a CachingEmbedFS [4].

[0] https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy/blob/main/Makefile#L77

[1] https://ntfy.sh/docs/

[2] https://ntfy.sh/app

[3] https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy/blob/main/server/serve...

[4] https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy/blob/main/util/embedfs...

leetrout|3 years ago

That is how I am building mine and have thoroughly enjoyed it. Especially since 1.18 updated support to allow directories / files that start with an underscore.

I am using svelte for the frontend and that was biting me.

ge96|3 years ago

I saw on the "who's hiring" for July Go is at the same level of demand as Node pretty cool

Gotta put Go on my list of things to learn

tusharsoni|3 years ago

Please do! If nothing else, it's definitely a fun language to learn. We're also setting up a community of folks who are learning Go/Copper. Check the project readme link for the link.

pram|3 years ago

Haha, moscow mule? I appreciate the alcohol name theme to go with all the other Go web frameworks. ;P

tusharsoni|3 years ago

haha yeah, gotta keep the tradition going

zinodaur|3 years ago

Copper looks really cool - bringing the rapid dev of Rails to golang. Very tight demo btw

synergy20|3 years ago

So go is trying to be a server-side-render framework here, what about the SPA style in that go is a simple json-api server, and let SPA to do all the template and render, is gin the best framework for that? new to golang here.

tusharsoni|3 years ago

I think that remains a very valid use case. In Copper, you can create one of those with the CLI. For example `copper create -frontend=vite:react github.com/nasa/starship` will create a react app with a JSON backed API ready to go

AlphaSite|3 years ago

I found Echo a better framework than gin, since it cleans up some of the warts around error handling etc.

As for database, jet is my favourite thus far.

dangelov|3 years ago

I've been using Mux & sqlc in a few projects and it's working out great.

born-jre|3 years ago

this looks fine but not a fan of gorm.

but it could be decent choice if u want to build integrated framework i can understand why people would choose it, another option is code_generation_meta_hell with sqlboiler. upper db [0] would have been perfect fit for this kind of project but is not that famous, its development is slow but stable.

ps: i like sqlboiler what i am saying is if u are building framework top on it then not that fun

[0]: https://github.com/upper/db

edit: include link

tusharsoni|3 years ago

Code generation is an awesome alternate, I'm more familiar with sqlc.dev. They're doing some really interesting work.

My goal with Copper is to provide out-of-the-box integrations with popular solutions to various problems. For now, I picked GORM but I definitely see adding support for other tools.

swagonomixxx|3 years ago

Will 2nd not being a fan of Gorm. In general not a fan of ORMs - implicit behaviours and magic query generation in a language like Go is completely antithetical to the explicit and verbose nature of the language.

mstef9|3 years ago

what do you think of Ent [1]?

[1] https://entgo.io/

unknown|3 years ago

[deleted]

al_mandi|3 years ago

How would you compare what you wrote with what Uber built (gofx, glue, etc?)

irq-1|3 years ago

wire.go should have been named patina.go

unknown|3 years ago

[deleted]

icod1|3 years ago