Book Image

Building Distributed Applications in Gin

By : Mohamed Labouardy
4 (1)
Book Image

Building Distributed Applications in Gin

4 (1)
By: Mohamed Labouardy

Overview of this book

Gin is a high-performance HTTP web framework used to build web applications and microservices in Go. This book is designed to teach you the ins and outs of the Gin framework with the help of practical examples. You’ll start by exploring the basics of the Gin framework, before progressing to build a real-world RESTful API. Along the way, you’ll learn how to write custom middleware and understand the routing mechanism, as well as how to bind user data and validate incoming HTTP requests. The book also demonstrates how to store and retrieve data at scale with a NoSQL database such as MongoDB, and how to implement a caching layer with Redis. Next, you’ll understand how to secure and test your API endpoints with authentication protocols such as OAuth 2 and JWT. Later chapters will guide you through rendering HTML templates on the server-side and building a frontend application with the React web framework to consume API responses. Finally, you’ll deploy your application on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and learn how to automate the deployment process with a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. By the end of this Gin book, you will be able to design, build, and deploy a production-ready distributed application from scratch using the Gin framework.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: Inside the Gin Framework
3
Section 2: Distributed Microservices
9
Section 3: Beyond the Basics

Exploring authentication

In the previous chapter, the API we built exposed multiple endpoints. For now, those endpoints are public and don't require any authentication. In a real-world scenario, you would need to secure those endpoints.

The following diagram illustrates the endpoints to be secured by the end of this chapter:

Figure 4.1 – Securing RESTful API endpoints

Listing recipes will require no authentication, while the endpoints responsible for adding, updating, or deleting a recipe will require authentication.

Multiple methods can be used to secure the preceding endpoints—here are a few of the methods we could use: API keys, Basic Auth, client sessions, OpenID Connect, Open Authorization (OAuth) 2.0, and so on. The most basic authentication mechanism is the usage of API keys.

Using API keys

In this method, the client provides a secret, called an API key, in the request header. The key is then verified at the endpoint handler...