31 posts tagged with "go"

Fiber's API was inspired by Express, and it shows: routes look the same, parameters use the same :name syntax, middleware chains work the way you expect. If you know Express, you already know most of Fiber - you just do not know the spelling yet.

This post is the phrasebook. Express on the left, Fiber v3 on the right, organized by what you do all day: read requests, write responses, chain middleware, handle errors. At the end, the three differences that are not spelling - the ones that cause real bugs when Node instincts meet Go.

For a lot of applications - admin panels, dashboards, internal tools, CRUD frontends - the default stack of a JavaScript SPA talking to a JSON API is more machinery than the problem needs. Two codebases, a bundler, a node toolchain in CI, and client-side state that mirrors what the server already knows.

HTMX takes the opposite approach: the server renders HTML, and a small script extends HTML with attributes like hx-get and hx-target so any element can fetch a fragment and swap it into the page. No build step, no client-side router, no JSON serialization layer.

Fiber is a natural fit for this. Its template engines render fragments fast, the whole application compiles to one binary, and the request handling you already know - routing, binding, middleware - is all there is to learn. Let's build a live-search contact list to see the full loop.

You use logger, cors, and limiter every day. Sooner or later you need something Fiber does not ship: tenant resolution from the hostname, an audit trail, a company-specific auth header. The instinct is to look for a plugin API or an interface to implement.

There is none, and that is the point. A Fiber middleware is an ordinary handler - func(c fiber.Ctx) error - that calls c.Next() to hand control to the rest of the chain. Everything else, including the polished config pattern the official middleware uses, is convention on top of that one idea.

This post walks through the whole ladder: the minimal middleware, short-circuiting, passing data downstream, and the official Config convention, ending with the one caveat that catches almost everyone.