Deploying a Go web application on Apache

To deploy a Go web application on Apache, we need to understand how the Go language runs a web app. Go uses the net/http package (standard library) for this, which provides implementations for both HTTP clients and HTTP servers. You can find a good example of its use in the documentation:

package main

import (
	"io"
	"log"
	"net/http"
)

func main() {
	// Hello world, the web server

	helloHandler := func(w http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request) {
		io.WriteString(w, "Hello, world!\n")
	}

	http.HandleFunc("/hello", helloHandler)
	log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil))
}

This is an example of the ListenAndServer method. Then, when we run our web with go run main.go and go to our browser, we should see “Hello, word” on the screen.

Excellent, we can say that this is our first web page on our local server, and when we run the command go run main.go we get “Hello, word”.

Here we can see that the server is on port 8080. How could we make Apache implement this?

Apache Configuration

Assuming we already have Apache installed and configured for our website, what should we do to display the content of our Go HTTP Client-Server? There are a few different ways to do this, but the most convenient approach for using Go is to set up a reverse proxy in Apache.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName tu-dominio.com

    ProxyPreserveHost On
    ProxyPass / http://localhost:8888/
    ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8888/

    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/mi-app-error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/mi-app-access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Let’s remember that the configuration file will generally need to be in /etc/apache2/sites-available/

So far, everything is good for my application, right? I have my Apache server, and to run the Go server, I run my go run main.go?

The answer to this question is no, we cannot have our console unusable while the server is running.

Creating a Daemon with systemd for My Application

To make our server run in the background, we will need a Daemon or demon, as you may call it. This will need to run the server until we tell it to stop, a simple concept, but it still needs to be configured.

You will need to create a service file, so you will need to do it in /etc/systemd/system/ if you are using Linux Ubuntu.

vim /etc/systemd/system/mygoapp.service

[Unit]
Description=Mi Aplicación Go
After=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/home/tu-usuario/mi-app/mi-app-ejecutable
WorkingDirectory=/home/tu-usuario/mi-app
Restart=always
User=tu-usuario
Group=tu-grupo
Environment=GIN_MODE=release

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Service config explained

[Unit] – Contains metadata and dependencies about the service being configured.

[Service]

[Install]

Testing the Daemon for Our Go Website on Apache

To all these things works, we have to reload the systemd with the following command:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

Alright, how do we start and stop the service at will?
Remember, we’re using systemd, so starting and stopping the service will be governed by it.

sudo systemctl stop mygoapp.service

sudo systemctl start mygoapp.service