When it comes to building an API, Go is an extremely popular programming language choice to build powerful RESTful APIs. The language is super lightweight, has many different libraries and frameworks available, and is easy to run. One of the frameworks supported by Go is Gin. Gin is a web framework written in Golang that offers great performance and scalability, amongst other features. According to the Gin website, “Gin features a Martini-like API, but with performance up to 40 times faster than Martini”. This tutorial will build a simple REST API using Go and Gin. The API endpoint will allow a user to retrieve a credit score rating. Of course, we won’t be linking up to any backend systems to pull a credit score but will instead use a random number generator to generate the score and return it to the user. Although simple, this tutorial will show you the basics of REST API development with Go and Gin.
Pre-requisites
Before we start, we must ensure that a couple of prerequisites are completed. To follow along and run this tutorial, you will need to: