Negroni is an idiomatic approach to web middleware in Go. It is tiny, non-intrusive, and encourages use of net/http Handlers.

If you like the idea of Martini, but you think it contains too much magic, then Negroni is a great fit.

After installing Go and setting up your GOPATH, create your first .go file. We'll call it server.go.

package main

import (
  "github.com/codegangsta/negroni"
  "net/http"
  "fmt"
)

func main() {
  mux := http.NewServeMux()
  mux.HandleFunc("/", func(w http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request) {
    fmt.Fprintf(w, "Welcome to the home page!")
  })

  n := negroni.Classic()
  n.UseHandler(mux)
  n.Run(":3000")
}

Then install the Negroni package (go 1.1 and greater is required):

go get github.com/codegangsta/negroni

Then run your server:

go run server.go

You will now have a Go net/http webserver running on localhost:3000.

If you have a question or feature request, go ask the mailing list. The GitHub issues for Negroni will be used exclusively for bug reports and pull requests.

Negroni is not a framework. It is a library that is designed to work directly with net/http.

Negroni is BYOR (Bring your own Router). The Go community already has a number of great http routers available, Negroni tries to play well with all of them by fully supporting net/http. For instance, integrating with Gorilla Mux looks like so:

router := mux.NewRouter()
router.HandleFunc("/", HomeHandler)

n := negroni.New(Middleware1, Middleware2)
// Or use a middleware with the Use() function
n.Use(Middleware3)
// router goes last
n.UseHandler(router)

n.Run(":3000")

negroni.Classic() provides some default middleware that is useful for most applications:

• negroni.Recovery - Panic Recovery Middleware.
• negroni.Logging - Request/Response Logging Middleware.
• negroni.Static - Static File serving under the "public" directory.

This makes it really easy to get started with some useful features from Negroni.

Negroni provides a bidirectional middleware flow. This is done through the negroni.Handler interface:

type Handler interface {
  ServeHTTP(rw http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request, next http.HandlerFunc)
}

If a middleware hasn't already written to the ResponseWriter, it should call the next http.HandlerFunc in the chain to yield to the next middleware handler. This can be used for great good:

func MyMiddleware(rw http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request, next http.HandlerFunc) {
  // do some stuff before
  next(rw, r)
  // do some stuff after
}

And you can map it to the handler chain with the Use function:

n := negroni.New()
n.Use(negroni.HandlerFunc(MyMiddleware))

You can also map plain old http.Handler's:

n := negroni.New()

mux := http.NewServeMux()
// map your routes

n.UseHandler(mux)

n.Run(":3000")

Negroni has a convenience function called Run. Run takes an addr string identical to http.ListenAndServe.

n := negroni.Classic()
// ...
log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(":8080", n))

If you have a route group of routes that need specific middleware to be executed, you can simply create a new Negroni instance and use it as your route handler.

router := mux.NewRouter()
adminRoutes := mux.NewRouter()
// add admin routes here

Create a new negroni for the admin middleware
router.Handle("/admin", negroni.New(
  Middleware1, 
  Middleware2, 
  negroni.Wrap(adminRoutes),
))

Here is a current list of Negroni compatible middlware. Feel free to put up a PR linking your middleware if you have built one:

gin and fresh both live reload negroni apps.

Negroni is obsessively designed by none other than the Code Gangsta