Developing Modern, Production-Ready Go Web Applications: An Introduction to the “Modern Go Stack”

In the rapidly evolving landscape of web development, there’s a growing demand for streamlined, efficient, and scalable tech stacks that facilitate rapid development while maintaining production readiness. Recognizing this need, I’ve crafted a comprehensive template centered around what I call the “Modern Go Stack”—a robust framework designed to simplify backend development, eliminate unnecessary dependencies, and deliver a seamless developer experience.

Conceptual Foundations of the Modern Go Stack

At its core, this stack leverages recent advancements in Go and associated tools to create a minimalistic yet powerful web application foundation. The primary goal was to achieve a single-binary deployment that is simple to build, secure, and easy to maintain, all without relying on heavyweight front-end frameworks or CGO dependencies. Here’s a breakdown of the fundamental components:

Backend: Efficient and Modern with Go 1.24+ and Echo v4

The backend harnesses the latest stable release of Go (version 1.24 and above) paired with the popular Echo v4 web framework. This combination ensures high performance, clean routing, and extensibility while maintaining minimal footprint.

Frontend: Server-Side Rendering with Type Safety Using Temply and HTMX

For the frontend, the stack employs Templ—a Go library that provides type-safe, server-rendered HTML components—paired with HTMX, a powerful library that enables dynamic, AJAX-style interactions directly from HTML attributes. This approach sidesteps complex JavaScript ecosystems, delivering a responsive and interactive user experience with minimal client-side code.

Database Layer: Type-Safe Queries with SQLC and SQLite (No CGO)

Data persistence is handled via SQLC, which generates type-safe Go code from raw SQL queries, facilitating safer database interactions. The database engine of choice is SQLite, interfaced through a pure Go driver—eliminating CGO dependencies—making deployment straightforward and cross-platform friendly.

Development Workflow: Fast Iteration with Mage and Air

A smooth development experience is achieved using Mage as a task runner, managing build processes, code generation, and deployment scripts. For hot-reloading during development, Air streamlines the process, enabling rapid iteration and debugging.

Building a Production-Ready Binary

The culmination of this stack is a self-contained, dependency-free binary approximately 14MB in size. This executable encompasses all necessary functionalities,