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go mod, go fmt/vet/doc, workspaces, build, and ship.

Build for Production & Deploy

You've made it through the language! Time to ship.

Building a release binary

CGO_ENABLED=0 GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 \
  go build -trimpath -ldflags="-s -w" -o myapp .
  • CGO_ENABLED=0 — pure-Go binary, no libc dependency. Runs on tiny base images.
  • -trimpath — strip absolute paths from the binary (smaller, reproducible).
  • -ldflags="-s -w" — strip debug symbols and DWARF info. Smaller binary.

Embed a version number via -ldflags:

package main
var version = "dev"   // overridden at build time

go build -ldflags="-X main.version=$(git describe --tags --always)" -o myapp .

A minimal Dockerfile

# 1. Build stage
FROM golang:1.23-alpine AS build
WORKDIR /src
COPY go.* ./
RUN go mod download
COPY . .
RUN CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -trimpath -ldflags="-s -w" -o /out/app .

# 2. Runtime stage — empty image, just the binary
FROM gcr.io/distroless/static-debian12
COPY --from=build /out/app /app
USER nonroot:nonroot
ENTRYPOINT ["/app"]

This gives you a ~10 MB image with no shell, no package manager — just your binary. Tight and secure.

Deploying to a serverless platform

Most platforms (Vercel, Cloud Run, Fly.io, AWS Lambda) can deploy a Go program in one of two ways:

  1. As a container using the Dockerfile above. Push, deploy, done.
  2. As source code that the platform builds for you (Vercel detects go.mod automatically).

This course itself uses option 2 — the /api/play route is a Node function on Vercel, but you could write it in Go just as easily.

The bigger picture

You now know enough Go to:

  • Build a CLI tool with cobra or just flag.
  • Build an HTTP API with net/http (or chi, echo, gin if you want pre-built middleware).
  • Run scheduled jobs with time.Ticker.
  • Talk to databases with database/sql and a driver like pgx.
  • Write tests, benchmarks, and fuzz suites for all of it.

The standard library is huge — and at this point you have the toolkit to read its docs and pull in whatever you need.

Production checklist

Before you ship a service to production, walk this list:

  • ✅ All HTTP clients have a Timeout.
  • ✅ All goroutines have a clear exit path (context cancellation or closed channel).
  • ✅ Errors are wrapped with %w and logged with context (request ID, user ID).
  • ✅ go test -race passes in CI on every PR.
  • ✅ A signal handler (signal.NotifyContext) gracefully shuts down.
  • ✅ Health endpoint (/healthz) for the orchestrator.
  • ✅ Structured logging (log/slog) — JSON in prod, text in dev.
  • ✅ Metrics or tracing — at minimum, request count + latency histogram.
  • ✅ The binary is built with -trimpath and stripped (-ldflags="-s -w").
  • ✅ The container runs as a non-root user.

🎉 Course complete. Welcome to the Go community.

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