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Go standards and style guidelines

This document describes various guidelines and best practices for GitLab projects using the Go language.

Overview

GitLab is built on top of Ruby on Rails, but we're also using Go for projects where it makes sense. Go is a very powerful language, with many advantages, and is best suited for projects with a lot of IO (disk/network access), HTTP requests, parallel processing, etc. Since we have both Ruby on Rails and Go at GitLab, we should evaluate carefully which of the two is best for the job.

This page aims to define and organize our Go guidelines, based on our various experiences. Several projects were started with different standards and they can still have specifics. They will be described in their respective README.md or PROCESS.md files.

Code Review

We follow the common principles of Go Code Review Comments.

Reviewers and maintainers should pay attention to:

  • defer functions: ensure the presence when needed, and after err check.
  • Inject dependencies as parameters.
  • Void structs when marshalling to JSON (generates null instead of []).

Security

Security is our top priority at GitLab. During code reviews, we must take care of possible security breaches in our code:

  • XSS when using text/template
  • CSRF Protection using Gorilla
  • Use a Go version without known vulnerabilities
  • Don't leak secret tokens
  • SQL injections

Remember to run SAST [ULTIMATE] on your project (or at least the gosec analyzer), and to follow our Security requirements.

Web servers can take advantages of middlewares like Secure.

Finding a reviewer

Many of our projects are too small to have full-time maintainers. That's why we have a shared pool of Go reviewers at GitLab. To find a reviewer, use the Engineering Projects page in the handbook. "GitLab Community Edition (CE)" and "GitLab Community Edition (EE)" both have a "Go" section with its list of reviewers.

To add yourself to this list, add the following to your profile in the team.yml file and ask your manager to review and merge.

projects:
  gitlab-ee: reviewer go
  gitlab-ce: reviewer go

Code style and format

  • Avoid global variables, even in packages. By doing so you will introduce side effects if the package is included multiple times.
  • Use go fmt before committing (Gofmt is a tool that automatically formats Go source code).

Automatic linting

All Go projects should include these GitLab CI/CD jobs:

go lint:
  image: golang:1.11
  script:
    - go get -u golang.org/x/lint/golint
    - golint -set_exit_status

Once recursive includes become available, you will be able to share job templates like this analyzer.

Dependencies

Dependencies should be kept to the minimum. The introduction of a new dependency should be argued in the merge request, as per our Approval Guidelines. Both License Management [ULTIMATE] and Dependency Scanning [ULTIMATE] should be activated on all projects to ensure new dependencies security status and license compatibility.

Modules

Since Go 1.11, a standard dependency system is available behind the name Go Modules. It provides a way to define and lock dependencies for reproducible builds. It should be used whenever possible.

There was a bug on modules checksums in Go < v1.11.4, so make sure to use at least this version to avoid checksum mismatch errors.

ORM

We don't use object-relational mapping libraries (ORMs) at GitLab (except ActiveRecord in Ruby on Rails). Projects can be structured with services to avoid them. PQ should be enough to interact with PostgreSQL databases.

Migrations

In the rare event of managing a hosted database, it's necessary to use a migration system like ActiveRecord is providing. A simple library like Journey, designed to be used in postgres containers, can be deployed as long-running pods. New versions will deploy a new pod, migrating the data automatically.

Testing

We should not use any specific library or framework for testing, as the standard library provides already everything to get started. For example, some external dependencies might be worth considering in case we decide to use a specific library or framework:

Use subtests whenever possible to improve code readability and test output.

Benchmarks

Programs handling a lot of IO or complex operations should always include benchmarks, to ensure performance consistency over time.

CLIs

Every Go program is launched from the command line. cli is a convenient package to create command line apps. It should be used whether the project is a daemon or a simple cli tool. Flags can be mapped to environment variables directly, which documents and centralizes at the same time all the possible command line interactions with the program. Don't use os.GetEnv, it hides variables deep in the code.

Daemons

Logging

The usage of a logging library is strongly recommended for daemons. Even though there is a log package in the standard library, we generally use logrus. Its plugin ("hooks") system makes it a powerful logging library, with the ability to add notifiers and formatters at the logger level directly.

Tracing and Correlation

LabKit is a place to keep common libraries for Go services. Currently it's vendored into two projects: Workhorse and Gitaly, and it exports two main (but related) pieces of functionality:

This gives us a thin abstraction over underlying implementations that is consistent across Workhorse, Gitaly, and, in future, other Go servers. For example, in the case of gitlab.com/gitlab-org/labkit/tracing we can switch from using Opentracing directly to using Zipkin or Gokit's own tracing wrapper without changes to the application code, while still keeping the same consistent configuration mechanism (i.e. the GITLAB_TRACING environment variable).

Context

Since daemons are long-running applications, they should have mechanisms to manage cancellations, and avoid unnecessary resources consumption (which could lead to DDOS vulnerabilities). Go Context should be used in functions that can block and passed as the first parameter.

Dockerfiles

Every project should have a Dockerfile at the root of their repository, to build and run the project. Since Go program are static binaries, they should not require any external dependency, and shells in the final image are useless. We encourage Multistage builds:

  • They let the user build the project with the right Go version and dependencies.
  • They generate a small, self-contained image, derived from Scratch.

Generated docker images should have the program at their Entrypoint to create portable commands. That way, anyone can run the image, and without parameters it will display its help message (if cli has been used).

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