September 5, 2023 • 3 min read • Go Programming

One of The Easiest Ways to Host your Go Web App

Hello! In this post, I will explain the cost-effective method I use to host my Go web applications with varying levels of complexity, all starting from as low as $5 per month. This method also allows to easy deploy and scale your golang application.

As an example, this is how I host whattoreadafter.xyz, a service that recommends books based on the book you just finished reading, by using AI.

Starting off, let’s enumerate the tools we’ll be using alongside Golang:

DigitalOcean - a cloud computing platform that provides virtual machines and other resources.
Docker - a set of platform as a service products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers.

In order to follow along, you will need to have a DigitalOcean account. If you don’t have one, you can sign up here and get $200 in credit over 60 days.

Let’s get started! For simplicity sake, our application will be a simple web server that returns current time in UTC format.

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"net/http"
	"time"
)

func currentTimeHandler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
	currentTime := time.Now().UTC()
	fmt.Fprintf(w, "Current Time (UTC): %s", currentTime.Format(time.RFC3339))
}

func main() {
	http.HandleFunc("/", currentTimeHandler)
	fmt.Println("Server is running on port 8080")
	http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
}

Now let’s host it!

In order for you to easier follow along, I will list the steps we will take to host our application:

1. Prepare a Dockerfile for our application and place it in the root of our project alongside the `main.go` file.

Example:

FROM golang:alpine AS builder
RUN apk add --no-cache --update \
        git \
        ca-certificates
ADD . /app
WORKDIR /app
COPY go.mod ./
RUN  go mod download
RUN CGO_ENABLED=0 GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build -a -o /main .

FROM alpine
COPY --from=builder /main ./
RUN chmod +x ./main
ENTRYPOINT ["./main"]