Quick start

This guide walks you through creating a Lightning app from scratch, registering a route, and verifying the response with curl.

Install Lightning

Add Lightning to your Go module:

go get github.com/go-labx/lightning

If you don’t have a module yet, initialize one first:

mkdir myapp && cd myapp
go mod init myapp
go get github.com/go-labx/lightning

Create main.go

Create a file named main.go with the following content:

package main

import "github.com/go-labx/lightning"

func main() {
    app := lightning.DefaultApp()

    app.Get("/ping", func(ctx *lightning.Context) {
        ctx.JSON(lightning.StatusOK, lightning.Map{
            "message": "pong",
        })
    })

    app.Run()
}

DefaultApp() creates a new application with two middleware functions already registered: Logger(), which logs every request, and Recovery(), which catches panics and returns a 500 response. Use NewApp() if you want a bare application with no middleware.

Run the server

Start the server:

go run main.go

You should see output similar to:

[lightning-app] INFO Starting application on address `:6789`

Lightning listens on port 6789 by default. You can override this by passing an address to app.Run(), for example app.Run(":8080"), or by setting the PORT environment variable.

Test with curl

In a separate terminal, send a request to your running server:

curl http://127.0.0.1:6789/ping

You should receive:

{"message":"pong"}

The server terminal will also print a log line for the request, showing the remote address, method, status code, path, and elapsed time.

What’s next

Now that your app is running, explore the core concepts:

Routing — add URL parameters, wildcards, and multiple HTTP methods
Middleware — write custom middleware and apply it globally or to specific routes
Context API — read request data and send structured responses
Route groups — organize routes under shared prefixes with scoped middleware

Get Started

Core Concepts

Guides

Configuration

What’s next

​What’s next

What’s next