Go programs can listen on port 80 and serve HTTP requests directly. Instead, you may want to use a reverse proxy in front of your Go program, so that it listens on port 80 and and connects to your program on port, say, 4000. There are many reason for doing the latter: not having to run your Go program as root, serving other websites/services on the same host, SSL termination, load balancing, logging, etc.
I use HAProxy in front. Any reverse proxy could work. Nginx is also a great option (much more popular than HAProxy and capable of doing more).
HAProxy is very easy to configure if you read its documentation (HTML version). My whole haproxy.cfg file for one of my Go projects follows, in case you need a starting pont.
global
log 127.0.0.1 local0
maxconn 10000
user haproxy
group haproxy
daemon
defaults
log global
mode http
option httplog
option dontlognull
retries 3
timeout connect 5000
timeout client 50000
timeout server 50000
frontend http
bind :80
acl is_stats hdr(host) -i hastats.myapp.com
use_backend stats if is_stats
default_backend myapp
capture request header Host len 20
capture request header Referer len 50
backend myapp
server main 127.0.0.1:4000
backend stats
mode http
stats enable
stats scope http
stats scope myapp
stats realm Haproxy\ Statistics
stats uri /
stats auth username:password
Nginx is even easier.
Regarding service control, I run my Go program as a system service. I think everybody does that. My server runs Ubuntu, so it uses Upstart. I have put this at /etc/init/myapp.conf for Upstart to control my program:
start on runlevel [2345]
stop on runlevel [!2345]
chdir /home/myapp/myapp
setgid myapp
setuid myapp
exec ./myapp start 1>>_logs/stdout.log 2>>_logs/stderr.log
Another aspect is deployment. One option is to deploy by just sending binary file of the program and necessary assets. This is a pretty great solution IMO. I use the other option: compiling on server. (I’ll switch to deploying with binary files when I set up a so-called “Continuous Integration/Deployment” system.)
I have a small shell script on the server that pulls code for my project from a remote Git repository, builds it with Go, copies the binaries and other assets to ~/myapp/, and restarts the service.
Overall, the whole thing is not very different from any other server setup: you have to have a way to run your code and have it serve HTTP requests. In practice, Go has proved to be very stable for this stuff.
