Learning GO - Creating the environment using docker - Part 1

Hey guys! How are you? Hope everyone is ok!

I'm a Rails developer that wants to learn Go and document the process on this series of articles. It's worth mentioning that I'm learning this technology, so, suggestions are welcome :)

In this article I'll setup docker and test it with a hello world!

Table of Content

Setting up Docker
Creating hello world
Creating Github repository

Setting up Docker

The first thing we need to do is create a folder to the repo, you can use the command bellow to create the folder and go to that directory:

mkdir learning_go
cd learning_go

This command will create a new folder called learning_go. All changes we gonna do will be in this folder.

Once the folder is created we need to create two files: Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml. You can use the following command to create this file:

touch Dockerfile
touch docker-compose.yml

Once the file is created you'll need to open the folder inside your favorite text editor.

The Dockerfile content will be the following:

FROM golang:1.19.2-alpine3.16

That's the only line you'll gonna need on this file. It tells docker to download a image that is built based on alpine linux and runs go version 1.19.2.

Now we need to edit docker-compose.yml, that's the file content:

version: '3.9'

services:
  learning_go:
    container_name: learning_go
    build: .
    volumes:
      - ./:/go/src/app
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    working_dir: /go/src/app
    tty: true

Once everything is done you need to run the following command:

docker-compose up -d

If everything is ok you should see something like this:

If you want to execute commands inside the docker container you must run the following command:

docker exec -it learning_go sh

Creating hello world

Now that docker is running as expected we need to create a go file to test it, so we gonna create a file called main.go in the root path of the application and set this content:

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    fmt.Println("hello world!")
}

This code is only a basic hello world example. To execute this code you need to run the following command inside the docker container:

go run main.go

You should see the following output:

Creating Github repository

Now that everything is working we need to store the code in a github repository. To do so you just need to access this url and set the repo name such as the image bellow