nirvana

nirvana

Introduction

nirvana is a golang http framework designed with productivity and usability in mind. It aims to be the building block for all golang services in Caicloud. The high-level goals are:

• Reduce api level errors and inconsistency
• Improve engineering productivity via removing repeated work, adding code generation, etc
• Adding new resource type should only require defining struct definition
• Adding validation should only require declaring validation method as part of struct definition
• Consistent behavior, structure and layout across all golang server projects

Features

Following is a list of requirements we've seen from writing golang services. Some of these features are general ones while some are specific to Caicloud. Note this is not an exhaustive list.

Routing, Request & Response

• Routes mapping from request to function
• Routes grouping
• Request/Response API object marshal/unmarshal
• General middleware support with sane default (logging, recovery, tracing)
• Contextual process chain and parameter injection
• Enforcing API error convention

Instrumentation

• Provide default metrics at well-known endpoints for prometheus to scrape
• Tracing is provided by default to allow better troubleshooting
• Profiling can be enabled in debug mode for troubleshootting

Validation

• Provide default validation on api types with struct tags
• Support custom validations defined by developers on api types
• Support validation on all parameters (path, query, etc)

Usability

• A working project should be brought up with few lines using the framework
• Framework must automatically follow engineering conventions to help developers focus on business logic
• OpenAPI (swagger 2.0) specification can be generated automatically with no extra work
• Provides a well-established layout conforming to golang project layout
• Easy and standard configuration management
• A reasonable support for websocket