Go Programming Blueprints

A simple main function to serve our API

A web service is nothing more than a simple Go program that binds to a specific HTTP address and port and serves requests, so we get to use all our command-line tool-writing knowledge and techniques.

Tip

We also want to ensure that our main function is as simple and modest as possible, which is always a goal of coding, especially in Go.

Before we write our main function, let's look at a few design goals of our API program:

• We should be able to specify the HTTP address and port to which our API listens and the address of the MongoDB instances without having to recompile the program (through command-line flags)
• We want the program to gracefully shut down when we terminate it, allowing the in-flight requests (requests ...