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)

Getting comfortable with the GitHub REST API

GitHub provides a well-written, easy to consume REST API. It opens up the data about users, repositories, repository statistics, and so on to the clients through well-formed API. The current stable version is v3. The API documentation can be found at https://developer.github.com/v3/. The root endpoint of the API is https://api.github.com.

All GitHub API routes will be appended to this root endpoint. Let's learn how to make a few queries and get data. For an unauthenticated client, the rate limit is 60/hour, whereas, for clients who are passing client_id (we can get it from their GitHub account console), it is 5,000/hour.

If you have a GitHub account (if not, it is highly recommended that you create one), you can find the access tokens in the Your Profile | Personal Access Tokens section or by visiting https://github.com/settings...