Go Lang

I’ve been avoiding Docker for a very long time. I started as a sysadmin setting up servers running FreeBSD and early versions of Debian on bare-bone servers. As soon as “cloud” came into the market, I switched to AWS and GCE and have used them since then. EC2 was my always goto choice to deploy something on the internet quickly. But Docker — for some reason, I was avoiding it until this two years ago, when I started using it. Without too much trust.

But today, history is not about my love & hate relationship with Docker, but about deploying the GO application and VIPS library. A couple of problems appeared during the process, and it’s worth mentioning them for future generations because I could find much help around my issues.

I built a simple worker to do some magic with images by using Go & VIPS . I chose VIPS because it is blazing fast compared to other Go image processing libraries. So this is the story about what went wrong.

Because my DEV setup is Apple MacBook Pro with M1 Apple Silicon, it’s always tricky to compile something to the proper architecture. Installing VIPS on my machine, it’s pretty straightforward:

brew install vips

You can find some online APIs and use the free tier to test them, but you can make them your own. So without any further instructions, here is a recipe.

Quite often we are looking for a quick way to make a request in GO, and we have working query tested in CURL. Sometimes it’s problematic to “move” all queries to GO, and build up whole query using client, protocol and so on.

From the author of my beloved Caddy server there is a tool called curl-to-Go which basically does what is says. Just paste your CURL request and GO lang code to implement that.

It’s a simple mechanic to decompose emails into valuable parts, like some markup (to push emails directly into internal systems), create file attachments and extract inline images.

Flow is pretty simple, but we have a couple of components.

1. We need something to “receive” emails. The easiest way is to use Amazon SES or mailgun or… something else. There are a couple of SASS solutions for that.
2. Next step is to be notified when the email arrives, so we don’t have overhead with checking email every couple of minutes
3. We have to “decompose” – decode email from it’s raw format to text, and attachments. We can achieve that using couple of existing libraries, but you get the idea
4. We have to save all data and expose it to public

So we know what to do and roughly how to do the whole process. Points 1 and 2 are pretty straightforward for anyone who uses AWS and their services.