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.