Announcing App Engine’s New Go 1.11 Runtime
16 October 2018
App Engine launched experimental support for Go in 2011. In the subsequent years, the Go community has grown significantly and has settled on idiomatic patterns for cloud-based applications. Today, Google Cloud is announcing a new Go 1.11 runtime
Starting with Go 1.11, Go on App Engine has no limits on application structure,
supported packages, context.Context
app.yaml
file, and your app is ready
to deploy on App Engine.
Specifying Dependencies
describes how the new runtime
supports vendoring and
modules (experimental) for dependency
management.
Along with Cloud Functions support for Go (more on that in a future post), App Engine provides a compelling way to run Go code on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with no concern for the underlying infrastructure.
Let’s take a look at creating a small application for App Engine. For the
example here, we assume a GOPATH
-based workflow, although Go modules have
experimental support
as well.
First, you create the application in your GOPATH
:
// This server can run on App Engine. package main import ( "fmt" "log" "net/http" "os" ) func main() { port := os.Getenv("PORT") if port == "" { port = "8080" } http.HandleFunc("/", hello) log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(fmt.Sprintf(":%s", port), nil)) } func hello(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) { w.Write([]byte("Hello, 世界")) }
The code contains an idiomatic setup for a small HTTP server that responds with
“Hello, 世界.” If you have previous App Engine experience, you’ll notice the
absence of any call to appengine.Main()
, which is now entirely optional.
Furthermore, the application code is completely portable—there are no ties to
the infrastructure that your application is deployed on.
If you need to use external dependencies, you can add those dependencies to a
vendor
directory or to a go.mod
file, both of which the new runtime
supports.
With the application code complete, create an app.yaml
file to specify
the runtime:
runtime: go111
Finally, set your machine up with a Google Cloud Platform account:
With all the setup complete, you can deploy using one command:
gcloud app deploy
We think Go developers will find the new Go 1.11 runtime for App Engine an exciting addition to the available options to run Go applications. There is a free tier. Check out the getting started guide or the migration guide and deploy an app to the new runtime today!