Book Image

Hands-On RESTful Web Services with Go - Second Edition

By : Naren Yellavula
Book Image

Hands-On RESTful Web Services with Go - Second Edition

By: Naren Yellavula

Overview of this book

Building RESTful web services can be tough as there are countless standards and ways to develop API. In modern architectures such as microservices, RESTful APIs are common in communication, making idiomatic and scalable API development crucial. This book covers basic through to advanced API development concepts and supporting tools. You’ll start with an introduction to REST API development before moving on to building the essential blocks for working with Go. You’ll explore routers, middleware, and available open source web development solutions in Go to create robust APIs, and understand the application and database layers to build RESTful web services. You’ll learn various data formats like protocol buffers and JSON, and understand how to serve them over HTTP and gRPC. After covering advanced topics such as asynchronous API design and GraphQL for building scalable web services, you’ll discover how microservices can benefit from REST. You’ll also explore packaging artifacts in the form of containers and understand how to set up an ideal deployment ecosystem for web services. Finally, you’ll cover the provisioning of infrastructure using infrastructure as code (IaC) and secure your REST API. By the end of the book, you’ll have intermediate knowledge of web service development and be able to apply the skills you’ve learned in a practical way.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Installing the Nginx server

Nginx is a high-performing web server and load balancer. It is well suited for deploying high-traffic websites and API servers. Even though this decision is opinionated, it is a community-driven, industry-strong web server. It is similar to the Apache2 web server.

Nginx can also act as a reverse proxy server that allows us to redirect our HTTP requests to multiple application servers running on the same network. The main contender of Nginx is Apache's httpd. Nginx is an excellent static file server that can be used by web clients. Since we are dealing with APIs, we will take a look at how to deal with HTTP requests.

We can access Nginx in two ways:

  • Installation on a bare machine
  • Using a preinstalled Docker container

Let's understand both in more detail.

...