GopherSocial

A production-ready social media application backend built with Go, featuring REST APIs for users, posts, and comments. This project demonstrates best practices in Go application architecture, database management, and containerization.

Project Overview

GopherSocial is a backend service for a social media platform. It provides APIs for:

• User management and authentication
• Creating, reading, and managing posts
• Adding and managing comments on posts
• RESTful endpoints for all operations

Technology Stack

• Language: Go 1.25.0
• Web Framework: Chi Router
• Database: PostgreSQL
• Database Drivers: pq (lib/pq)
• Validation: go-playground/validator
• Containerization: Docker & Docker Compose
• Migrations: golang-migrate

Project Features

• Optimistic Concurrency Control (OCC): Posts include versioning to prevent race conditions. When updating a post, the system checks if the version matches. If another client has modified the post (version mismatch), the update is rejected with a conflict error, ensuring data consistency without locking.
• Clean Architecture: Separation of concerns with cmd, internal, and store layers
• Error Handling: Custom error responses with meaningful messages
• JSON Serialization: Utilities for consistent JSON encoding/decoding
• Input Validation: Request validation using go-playground/validator
• Database Abstraction: Storage interface for flexible data persistence
• Environment Configuration: Flexible config via environment variables
• Docker Support: Containerized deployment ready
• Database Migrations: Version-controlled schema management

Running the project with Docker Compose

Start the entire stack with PostgreSQL:

docker compose -f docker-compose.yaml up -d --build

The API will be available at http://localhost:8080

Running Locally

1. Start PostgreSQL (ensure it's running on localhost:5432)

2. Run database migrations

make migrate-up

3. Build and run the API

go run ./cmd/api/main.go

The API will listen on :8080 (default) or the port specified in ADDR environment variable.

Database Migrations

Migrations are located in cmd/migrate/migrations/ and managed using golang-migrate.

Available Commands

# Run pending migrations
make migrate-up

# Rollback one migration
make migrate-down

# Create a new migration
make migrate-create migration_name