Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Full‑Stack Blog Application with Go, Gin, React, PostgreSQL, and Docker

The guide starts by initializing a Go module, installing Gin, and creating a basic main.go that starts a Gin router with a simple /api/hello endpoint.

It then adds a React frontend using esbuild-create-react-app, configures a proxy to the Gin API, and sets up TypeScript support.

Database integration is introduced with PostgreSQL and the go-pg ORM; migration scripts are written using go-pg/migrations to create users and posts tables.

User management code defines a User struct, password hashing with bcrypt, and functions AddUser, Authenticate, and FetchUser. JWT handling is added via github.com/cristalhq/jwt/v3, with generateJWT and verifyJWT utilities.

Authorization middleware extracts the bearer token, validates it, and loads the current user into the request context.

CRUD endpoints for blog posts are implemented ( createPost, indexPosts, updatePost, deletePost) and protected by the authorization middleware.

Custom error handling middleware translates validation errors into user‑friendly JSON responses.

Configuration is externalized to a .env file and loaded via a conf.Config struct; the CLI parses an -env flag to switch between development and production modes.

Logging is set up with zerolog, writing to stdout in dev and rotating log files in prod.

Graceful shutdown of the HTTP server is added using context cancellation and signal handling.

Finally, a multi‑stage Dockerfile builds the React assets, compiles the Go binary, and assembles a minimal Alpine image that serves static files in production; a docker-compose.yml orchestrates the application with a PostgreSQL container.