yongtenglei/snippetbox

Snippetbox is a small web application for creating, saving, and sharing short text snippets, think of it like a personal pastebin or a lightweight note board. You can write a short piece of text, give it a title, and it gets stored in a database so you or others can view it later. Each snippet has an expiration date, so old ones automatically drop off. Under the hood, the app is built in Go and relies on a MySQL database to store everything. The database holds three main pieces: the snippets themselves, user accounts (with passwords that are scrambled for security), and session data so the app remembers who you are when you log in. The README walks through the exact setup steps for creating these tables and seeding them with sample haikus, so you can see how the app works right out of the box. On the security side, it includes protection against common web attacks (CSRF), encrypted HTTPS connections by default, and password hashing. This project would appeal to someone learning Go who wants to see how all the pieces of a real web app fit together, routing, middleware, database queries, user authentication, and TLS. It is less a production-ready product and more a structured learning exercise, explicitly tied to the "Let's Go" tutorial book by Alex Edwards. A notable detail is that the project offers two ways to handle static files like CSS or images. The main version loads them from disk with a caching layer for speed. A separate branch bundles those files directly into the compiled binary, which means the app can run as a single file with no external assets to manage. That is a handy trick for deploying small Go services.