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Getting Started

Getting Started

Prerequisites

  • Go 1.22 or later
  • Make
  • A willingness to write HTML on the server like it's 1999 (it's fine, I promise)

That's it. No Node.js. No nvm. No fnm. No .nvmrc. No "please install the correct version of Node using our proprietary version manager that conflicts with the other three version managers you already have." You have Go. Go is enough.

Clone

git clone https://github.com/x1nx3r/gotth.git
cd gotth
make setup

make setup downloads the standalone Tailwind v4 compiler, tidies the Go module graph, compiles the initial .templ files, and generally gets the workspace into a state where things compile. It takes about 3 seconds.

Dev Server

make dev

This runs two things in parallel:

  1. tailwindcss --watch — scans your files for class names and rebuilds globals.css.output whenever you save. No PostCSS. No config. No "watcher detected a change but the pipeline is still initializing."

  2. air — a live-reload proxy that listens on port 3000, forwards to your Go app on port 3001, and injects a WebSocket reload script into every HTML response. When you save a .go or .templ file, air recompiles the binary and the browser tab reloads automatically.

The proxy exists because Vercel's serverless containers don't support WebSocket connections during cold boot, so the hot-reload layer is isolated to development. In production, you hit the Go binary directly.

Opening http://localhost:3000 should show you a working page. If it doesn't, check that port 3001 isn't occupied by another process. If it is, kill it. If you can't kill it, change the PORT environment variable in .air.toml.

Production Build

make build

Output: bin/server. A single static binary containing your entire application — templates, CSS, images, documentation, and routing logic. Copy it to a server, set PORT=8080, run it. No dependencies. No node_modules to carry over. No "but it worked on my machine."

If you're deploying to Vercel, you don't even need this step. Vercel detects main.go, runs go build itself, and deploys the result. The Makefile is for local development and non-Vercel hosts.

File Structure

gotth/
├── main.go                  # entry point, router registration
├── app/
│   ├── assets/              # embedded CSS, docs, public files
│   │   └── public/          # images, favicon, static files
│   ├── components/          # reusable templ components
│   ├── docs/                # documentation pages (the one you're reading)
│   ├── layout.templ         # shared HTML shell
│   ├── page.go              # page handlers (Go)
│   └── page.templ           # page templates (Templ)
├── bin/
│   └── tailwindcss          # standalone Tailwind binary
├── .air.toml                # live-reload config
├── go.mod
├── Makefile
└── vercel.json

That's the whole thing. Twelve entries. You can memorize it in the time it takes npm install to fail.