chat-hotwire-go

This is a simple chat app which shows how to use Go with Hotwire.

• Messages from another user are received via Turbo Streams over a websocket connection.
• A stimulus controller is used to clear the message form.
• The application can work without JavaScript

Setup

You need to have go and npm installed.

Then run:

go get -u github.com/cosmtrek/air
git clone https://github.com/lu4p/chat-hotwire-go.git
cd chat-hotwire-go
npm install
npm run dev

After the above just run air, to start the webapp with hot reloading.

Note: The generated dist/main.css file is rather large now at ~6MB, but don't worry this is only because every possible class of tailwind is included (there are many), once you build for production only ~4KB of CSS is left.

If you want to also rebuild the JS and CSS on change run npm run watch in a separate terminal session.

To build for production run npm run prod and then go build.

This project uses:

• html/template, a html templating library included in the stdlib of Go
• Echo, a Go web framework
• Hotwire a new approach from Basecamp for writing modern web applications without much JavaScript
• tailwindcss, makes HTML look nice
• webpack, for packing JS and CSS into single files, with minimization enabled, setup to extract CSS to a seperate file
• Air, for hot reloading Go code and templates on change.