Gow

Whilst I was working on the Go backend for a project recently that was running in a docker container, I became frustrated that most of the existing solutions for watching and restarting an app on change didn't work in a mounted volume. Those that did work required ridiculous amounts of configuration. This led me to create go watcher.

# Basic Usage

Install it with go get and then run your source file with gow instead of go.

go get github.com/mrbbot/gow

gow main.go

If you're using Go 1.11's modules, these will be installed automatically.

# Docker Usage

If we have a web app in a file called main.go,

package main

import "github.com/gin-gonic/gin"

func main() {
	r := gin.Default()
	r.GET("/ping", func(c *gin.Context) {
		c.JSON(200, gin.H{
			"message": "pong",
		})
	})
	_ = r.Run()
}

...and the Dockerfile shown below running with a volume mounted to /app,

FROM golang:1.11-alpine
RUN apk --update add git curl bash build-base
WORKDIR /app
RUN go get github.com/mrbbot/gow
CMD ["gow", "main.go"]
EXPOSE 8080

...anytime we change a file, the server will restart.