lightning

Lightning

A simple & blazingly fast API server for The Medialist.

Some highly critical function calls that require to be fast live over here. This project was started due to the slow response times achieved from the views from the server running Django. Since the majority of the backend is written in Python, there's no point in re-writing the entire codebase but for the views that perform simple retrievals (with proper authentication, of course), Go seems to be an apt fit to implement them in. The pattern is a simple "model controller" pattern since the only models we're working with are predefined from Django's ORM and we only return JSON responses.

The server used is provided by Go's built in http package and that lives inside main.go. All the handlers, aka the views, are written in handlers.go. The router used is the more than capable mux router. All the model operations (mostly retrievals) live inside db.go. There's some special data types that Go does not provide a good interface for and thus they are all stored inside structs.go - examples include a singly linked list for storing primary keys from database fetches.

All the handlers return JSON and thus there are no templates to work with. The frontend will most likely be served from the Django server but it might be implemented in Go in the future.

Since the project is mostly bare-bones Go with very few dependencies, no package manager is used. Proper documentation is in development and will be coming soon.

Documentation

Documentation can be found here.

License

Lightning is licensed under the MIT license.

Contributing

Lightning is a highly critical project and is, as of now, not accepting any pull requests since there is no formal contributing guides or a CI endpoint available. But they're both in development and will soon be available.

Further Reading

If you're here, check out the main backend written in Python - medialist-backend.