go4ignition

go4ignition is NOT a framework. This must be distinctly understood or nothing wonderful can come from its use. By design, there are minimal abstractions between its code and your code and there is no update mechanism. If you wish to update, you must run git pull and work through the resulting merge conflicts. It is expected that you fork it, change what you don't like, delete what you don't need, and add what's missing. Hopefully, this will help you get off the ground faster, similar to a framework, without incurring the ongoing maintenance costs of a framework. This approach isn't for everyone. Some people prefer using a framework and that's great. However, if you would prefer to avoid a framework but struggle, as most of us do, with time constraints then go4ignition might be exactly what you're looking for.

Shell Scripts

• reload.sh This script has only been tested on Linux and may not work correctly on other operating systems. This is the core of the developer experience. Running this script will compile your application, run it, and watch the project directory for changes. When a file is modified it will kill your application, re-compile it, and restart it. A round trip typically takes less than 2 seconds from the moment you save a file in your editor. This script will automatically invoke genpersistence.sh if sites/SITE/migrations.go has been modified. The genstatic.sh script will be invoked if a file within sites/SITE/static as modified. The gentemplate.sh script will be invoked if a file within sites/SITE/template has been modified.

• add_site.sh go4ignition projects support hosting multiple sites out of the box. The folder sites/.skeleton is used as a template for newly created sites. For example, if you own the domain example.com you can run the command ./add_site.sh example.com followed by the command ./reload.sh and your new site will be accessible at http://localhost.example.com:8002. For this to work, you either need to add 127.0.0.1 localhost.example.com to your /etc/hosts file OR define a DNS A record for localhost.example.com which resolves to 127.0.0.1.

• genimport.sh This script generates import.go, which contains one import statement for each site that has been added with add_site.sh. These import statement ensure that each site's init() method is called.

• genpersistence.sh This script runs each site's sites/SITE/migration.go file against an empty database, introspects the empty database, and generates persistence code for interacting with it.

• genstatic.sh For each site, this script scans the sites/SITE/static directory for and generates sites/SITE/static.go, which embeds all static files in the sites/SITE/static folder into the Go executable, along with metadata which allows them to be downloaded from StaticFileHandler.

• gentemplate.sh For each site, this script scans sites/SITE/template and generates sites/SITE/template.go, which embeds all templates into the Go executable, along with metadata which allows them to be parsed and used by handlers. For all html files outside the sites/SITE/template/fragment directory, a default handler is generated. The metadata in this file allows these generated handlers to be automatically registered with the web server.

Database

You can use whatever database you prefer but SQLite is the only database which is supported out of the box. By default, databases are stored at $HOME/.go4ignition/sites/SITE/SITE.db. Sane default pragmas, which should afford good SQLite performance, are provided in sites/database.go and are shared between sites. You may need to tune them for your use case, but they should be good enough to get you off the ground.

Database Migrations

Each site contains a sites/SITE/migrations.go file. This file contains a string array which is, creatively, named migrations. Each string in this array will be executed against the database in the order it appears in this array during application startup. Initially, this array will only contain one entry which is the SQLite definition for the Migration table. If you remove this, database migrations will not work because this table is used to track which migrations have already been run.

Port Number

The default port number is 8002 is set in sites/registry.go. Aside from code changes, this can be overridden with the --port command line flag or the G4I_PORT environment variable.

Hostname

You may be confused by the fact that all requests for localhost:8002 fail. This is a deliberate security precaution. There are always hackers are scanning IP addresses for open ports and when they find open ports they probe those ports looking for vulnerabilities. If they're scanning addresses in known address ranges, they may not even know your site exists. This is the circumstance this guards against. If your site is accessed by IP address, IE: The HTTP Host header doesn't contain a known hostname, HTTP 403 is automatically returned. This doesn't make your site secure by itself, but it does block a surprising amount of lazy malicious traffic. They're just scanning addresses in known networks. The hostname of each site has a direct relationship with its folder name. If you take the domain name and replace all the periods with underscores, you will get the name of the site folder. For example, the domain example.com becomes example_com. So, if you call ./add_site.sh example.com the folder sites/example_com will be created. You do not need to recompile go4ignition applications differently for each environment. It is strongly advised that you continue following this pattern. You're less likely to encounter bugs if the only difference between a test deployment and a production deployment is where you copy the binary to. Toward that end, whatever the domain name happens to be, local development can be done with localhost.DOMAIN_NAME. In our previous example, we used example.com. This means we would do local development with the hostname localhost.example.com.

Reserved URL Space

URL	Reason
/api/	Reserved for API calls
/ws/	Reserved for websockets
/static/	Reserved for static files