Go Microservice in 20 Minutes — HTTP Server to Production

The Problem

Go is excellent for microservices: fast compilation, small binaries, built-in concurrency, excellent standard library. But even a simple HTTP service needs:

• Router setup (chi / gin / standard library)
• Middleware chain (logging, recovery, CORS, auth)
• Configuration management (environment variables)
• Database connection pool with health checks
• Structured logging (slog / zap / zerolog)
• Graceful shutdown (handle SIGTERM properly)
• Health and readiness endpoints
• Request/response validation
• Error handling patterns
• Dockerfile + docker-compose

That's 500-800 lines of boilerplate before writing any business logic.

The Solution

The Go skill generates complete, idiomatic Go microservices following the standard project layout.

The Process

You: Create a Go microservice for user management:
- CRUD operations on users
- PostgreSQL storage
- JWT authentication middleware
- Structured logging with slog
- Health checks for K8s
- Graceful shutdown
- Docker-ready

The agent generates a clean Go project following standard layout conventions: cmd/server/main.go, internal/handler/, internal/service/, internal/repository/, internal/middleware/, with proper separation of concerns, context propagation, and error wrapping.

Key patterns the agent implements correctly:

• context.Context propagation through all layers
• Connection pool with SetMaxOpenConns, SetMaxIdleConns, SetConnMaxLifetime
• Graceful shutdown with os.Signal and server.Shutdown(ctx)
• Structured logging with request IDs in every log line
• Health check distinguishing between "live" (process running) and "ready" (database connected)

Setup on MrChief

skills:
  - go
  - docker
  - api-design