How does it work?

This section will help you understand how Gowebly CLI works.

💭 Just want to try?

No problem! Go to the Quick start guide and follow the instructions.

The Gowebly CLI is built on top of the Go programming language.

Therefore, it can run successfully on any supported system and architecture as an executable application. All the templates for the project (both backend and frontend) that it generates as a result of its work are already included in this executable. That is, you do not need any additional files to work with the CLI.

Backend part

The templates for the backend part of your project have been thoroughly tested and contain only the features and parameters you need to get started. You can use them as a good start and improve them as your project grows.

At this moment, the CLI supported the following Go web frameworks: Fiber, Gin, Echo, Chi, HttpRouter, Gorilla/Mux and PocketBase. By default, created project will use the built-in net/http package.

Server layer for htmx

The CLI uses the htmx-go package, which provides a more convenient API for using the htmx server layer in the backend part of your project.

Please note

All web frameworks are supported this package, except Fiber. As soon as its developers provide an adapter for integration or write their own wrapper to work with.

Templ

To be more efficient, the CLI supports the Templ templating engine. With its help, you can rapidly create UIs for your project without leaving the traditional Go environment.

All templates are regular Go functions, without having to create additional HTML templates and deal with the built-in Go templating engine (from the html/template package).

Linter for Go code

To make the code cleaner, we give the option to generate the golangci-lint configuration file with recommended settings. This is optional, but highly recommended.

Frontend part

To create a build for the frontend part, the quick and easy Parcel bundler version 2 was chosen. This allowed us to reduce the unnecessarily stressful moment of frontend build to the maximum.

No more need to understand configurations, the CLI has already prepared it for you.

At this moment, the CLI supported the following CSS frameworks: Tailwind CSS, UnoCSS, Bootstrap, Bulma, daisyUI, Flowbite and Preline UI components library. By default, created project will use the minimal CSS styles to demonstration.

Frontend runtime environment

We keep up with the latest updates to frontend development tools, so the CLI supports two JavaScript runtime environments: via the standard Node.js and the new and extremely fast Bun (which is backwards compatible with Node.js).

You can choose whichever you like best for your project.

htmx, hyperscript and Alpine.js

The htmx, hyperscript and Alpine.js reactive libraries are available as regular NPM packages in the package.json and will be added to the project "as is" in the ./assets/scripts.js file.

Prettier

Since v2.0.0, the Gowebly CLI supports the Prettier formatter to format your files.

Live-reload

The Gowebly CLI supports the live-reload feature by the Air tool. This works the same for both backend Go files and frontend files (JavaScript, CSS and so on).

Deploy

To successfully deploy your project to a remote server (or in the cloud), the CLI has pre-prepared Docker files (docker-compose.yml and Dockerfile). They already contain all the settings you need to create an isolated container exactly with your project.

Conclusion

All of this together gives us the confidence to say that you will enjoy working with the Gowebly CLI, whatever your experience in code and web development! 😉