Buffalo is a Go web development eco-system. Designed to make the life of a Go web developer easier.
Buffalo starts by generating a web project for you that already has everything from front-end (JavaScript, SCSS, etc...) to back-end (database, routing, etc...) already hooked up and ready to run. From there it provides easy APIs to build your web application quickly in Go.
Buffalo isn't just a framework, it's a holistic web development environment and project structure that lets developers get straight to the business of, well, building their business.
I ❤️ web dev in go again - Brian Ketelsen
Please visit http://gobuffalo.io for the latest documentation, examples, and more.
$ go get -u github.com/gobuffalo/buffalo/buffalo
NOTE: Buffalo has a minimum Go dependency of 1.8.1.
Buffalo also depends on:
- gcc for go-sqlite3 which is a cgo package.
- node and npm for the asset pipeline.
Buffalo aims to make building new web applications in Go as simple as possible, and what could be more simple than a new application generator?
$ buffalo new <name>
That will generate a whole new Buffalo application that is ready to go. It'll even run go get for you to make sure you have all of the necessary dependencies needed to run your application.
To see a list of available flags for the new command, just check out its help.
$ buffalo help new
Buffalo is Go "standards" compliant. That means you can just build your binary and run it. It's that simple.
One of the downsides to Go development is the lack of code "reloading". This means as you change your code you need to manually stop your application, rebuild it, and then restart it. Buffalo finds this is annoying and wants to make life better for you.
$ buffalo dev
The dev command will watch your .go and .html files by default, rebuild, and restart your binary for you so you don't have to worry about such things. Just run the dev command and start coding.
Just like running your application, Buffalo doesn't stop you from using the standard Go tools for testing. Buffalo does ship with a test command that will run all of your tests while conveniently skipping that pesky old ./vendor directory!
$ buffalo test
Buffalo would not be possible if not for all of the great projects it depends on. Please see SHOULDERS.md to see a list of them.
github.com/gobuffalo/plush - This templating package was chosen over the standard Go html/template package for a variety of reasons. The biggest of which is that it is significantly more flexible and easy to work with.
github.com/gorilla/mux - This router was chosen because of its stability and flexibility. There might be faster routers out there, but this one is definitely the most powerful!
github.com/markbates/grift - If you're familiar with Rake tasks from Ruby, you'll be right at home using Grift. This package was chosen to allow for the easy running of simple, and common, tasks that most web applications need. Think things like seeding a database or taking in a CSV file and generating database records. Buffalo ships with an example routes task that prints off the defined routes and the function that handles those requests.
github.com/markbates/pop - Accessing databases is nothing new in web applications. Pop, and its command line tool, Soda, were chosen because they strike a nice balance between simplifying common tasks, being idiomatic, and giving you the flexibility you need to built your app. Pop and Soda share the same core philosphies as Buffalo so they were a natural choice.
github.com/gorilla - The Gorilla toolkit is a great set of packages designed to improve upon the standard libary for a variety of web-related packages. With these high quality packages Buffalo is able to keep its "core" code to a minimum and focus on its goal of glueing them all together to make your life better.
Oh, yeah, everyone wants benchmarks! What would a web framework be without its benchmarks? Well, guess what? I'm not giving you any! That's right. This is Go! I assure you that it is plenty fast enough for you. If you want benchmarks you can either a) checkout any benchmarks that the GIANTS Buffalo is built upon have published, or b) run your own. I have no interest in playing the benchmark game, and neither should you.