Go-DDD: Domain Driven Design Template in Golang

Welcome to go-ddd, a reference implementation/template repository demonstrating the Domain Driven Design (DDD) and CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) approach in Golang. This project aims to help developers and architects understand the DDD structure, especially in the context of Go, and how it can lead to cleaner, enterprise-ready, maintainable, and scalable codebases.

Overview

Domain-Driven Design is a methodology and design pattern used to build complex enterprise software by connecting the implementation to an evolving model. go-ddd showcases this by setting up a simple marketplace where Sellers can sell Products.

Why DDD?

• Ubiquitous Language: Promotes a common language between developers and stakeholders.
• Isolation of Domain Logic: The domain logic is separate from the infrastructure and application layers, promoting SOLID principles.
• Scalability: Allows for easier microservices architecture transitions.

Documentation

📚 Comprehensive DDD & CQRS Principles Guide - Learn how to apply these patterns to any business domain.

Repository Structure

• domain: The heart of the software, representing business logic and rules.
  • entities: Fundamental objects within our system, like Product and Seller. Contains basic validation logic.
• application: Contains use-case specific operations that interact with the domain layer.
• infrastructure: Supports the higher layers with technical capabilities like database access.
  • db: Database access and models.
  • repositories: Concrete implementations of our storage needs.
• interface: The external layer which interacts with the outside world, like API endpoints.
  • api/rest: Handlers or controllers for managing HTTP requests and responses.

Further principles

• Domain
  • Must not depend on other layers.
  • Provides infrastructure with interfaces, but must not access infrastructure.
  • Implements business logic and rules.
  • Executes validations on entities. Validated entities are passed to the infrastructure layer.
  • Domain layer sets defaults of entities (e.g. uuid for ID or creation timestamp). Don't set defaults in the infrastructure layer or even database!
  • Do not leak domain objects to the outside world.
• Application
  • The glue code between the domain and infrastructure layer.
• Infrastructure
  • Repositories are responsible for translating a domain entity to a database model and retrieving it. No business logic is executed here.
  • Implements interfaces defined by the domain layer.
  • Implements persistence logic like accessing a postgres or mysql database.
  • When writing to storage, read written data before returning it. This ensures that the data is written correctly.

Best Practices

• Don't return validated entities from read methods in the repository. Instead, return the domain entity type directly.
  • Validations will change over time. You don't want to migrate all the data in your database. Instead, you should guarantee you can always load historical data, regardless of how your validation logic has evolved.
  • Otherwise, you won't be able to read data from the database that was written with a different validation logic. You will have to handle errors at runtime.
  • Push validation to the write side-creation (NewX) and update methods - where you must enforce invariants anyway.
• Don't put default values (e.g current timestamp or ID) in the database. Set them in the domain layer (factory!) for several reasons:
  • It's quite dangerous to have two sources of truth.
  • It's easier to test the domain layer.
  • Databases can get replaced, and you don't want to have to change all your default values.
• Always read the entity after write in the infrastructure layer.
  • This ensures that the data is written correctly, and we are never operating on stale data.
• find vs get:
  • find methods can return null or an empty list.
  • get methods must return a value. If the value is not found, throw an error.
• Deletion: Always use soft deletion. Create a deleted_at column in your database and set it to the current timestamp when deleting an entity. This way, you can always restore the entity if needed.

CQRS and Idempotency

Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS)

CQRS separates read operations (queries) from write operations (commands) in your application. In this codebase:

• Commands modify state (CreateSellerCommand, CreateProductCommand, UpdateSellerCommand)
• Queries retrieve data without side effects (FindAllSellers, FindSellerById)

This separation enables different optimization strategies:

• Write optimization: Commands can use normalized schemas, ACID transactions, and strong consistency
• Read optimization: Queries can use denormalized views, caching, read replicas, or even different databases (e.g., PostgreSQL for writes, Elasticsearch for reads)
• Scalability: Read and write workloads can be scaled independently based on actual usage patterns
• Performance: Complex queries don't impact write performance, and write locks don't block read operations

Idempotency Keys

Idempotency ensures that multiple identical requests have the same effect as a single request. This is crucial for handling network failures and retries in distributed systems. Implementation:

• Each command accepts an optional idempotency_key in the request
• The application layer checks if this key has been processed before
• If yes, it returns the cached response without re-executing business logic
• If no, it executes the command and stores the response for future requests

This prevents duplicate entities from being created when clients retry failed requests.

Tech Stack

This project uses the following key dependencies:

• GORM (gorm.io/gorm) - ORM library for database operations
• SQLite (gorm.io/driver/sqlite) - Default database (with PostgreSQL support via gorm.io/driver/postgres)
• Echo (github.com/labstack/echo/v4) - HTTP web framework
• UUID (github.com/google/uuid) - UUID generation
• Testify (github.com/stretchr/testify) - Testing toolkit

Getting Started

1. Clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/sklinkert/go-ddd.git
cd go-ddd
go mod download
go run ./...

Contributions

Contributions, issues, and feature requests are welcome! Feel free to check the issues page.

License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.