Abdullahi Mohamed // Engineering Home Base

I built this tool during my internship to save myself from the repetitive task of syncing my backend routes with my frontend. I was tired of manually writing endpoint strings and making typos in path parameters.

Why I made this

I wanted a simple way to have the Go compiler tell the frontend what's available without having to switch to a heavy framework like tRPC.

How it works

The Go Scraper: Written in Go, it uses the go/ast and go/parser packages to read my code and find where I've defined net/http routes. It looks for strings like METHOD /path and finds the path parameters.
The Frontend Client: This is a small TypeScript package I published to NPM that takes the map of routes and provides an Axios wrapper. It's strictly typed, so I can't request a route that doesn't exist.

Using Go's AST

The core part of this is how it reads the Go code. I originally tried using regex, but it broke on complicated Go formatting. Switching to the AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) made it much more reliable.

// A small part of the AST visitor I built
func (v *Visitor) Visit(node ast.Node) ast.Visitor {
    call, ok := node.(*ast.CallExpr)
    if !ok { return v }
    sel, ok := call.Fun.(*ast.SelectorExpr)
    if !ok { return v }
    if sel.Sel.Name == "HandleFunc" || sel.Sel.Name == "Handle" {
        if len(call.Args) > 0 {
            if lit, ok := call.Args[0].(*ast.BasicLit); ok {
                v.Routes = append(v.Routes, lit.Value)
            }
        }
    }
    return v
}

Installation

# Go CLI
go install github.com/Abdallemo/go-route-gen@latest
# Frontend Client
npm install @abdallemo/routegen-client

What's next

I want to try adding support for generating body schemas as well, so the request and response objects are typed too. I'm also thinking about better integration for custom authentication headers.