Quick Start Guide

May 31, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

Welcome to gorazor! This guide will walk you through setting up a simple project, writing your first template, compiling it to Go code, and rendering it inside a standard Go web server.

1. Installation

First, install the gorazor command-line tool on your machine:

go install github.com/sipin/gorazor@latest

Ensure your Go bin directory ($GOPATH/bin or $HOME/go/bin) is in your system's PATH.

2. Step 1: Write a Template

Create a new directory named tpl for your templates, and create a file inside named tpl/index.gohtml:

@{
    // The first block is dedicated to declarations
    var name string
    var items []string
}

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>Gorazor Quick Start</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Hello, @name!</h1>
    
    <h3>Your Shopping List:</h3>
    @if len(items) == 0 {
        <p>No items on your list.</p>
    } else {
        <ul>
        @for _, item := range items {
            <li>@item</li>
        }
        </ul>
    }
</body>
</html>

3. Step 2: Compile the Template

Run the gorazor compiler on your tpl folder to generate Go source files. Run the following command:

gorazor tpl tpl

This compiles tpl/index.gohtml into a native Go source file tpl/index.go. Under the hood, this file exports:

  • tpl.Index(name string, items []string) string: Renders the template to a string.
  • tpl.RenderIndex(_buffer io.StringWriter, name string, items []string): Renders directly into a buffer/writer for zero-allocation performance.

4. Step 3: Serve the Template in a Go Web Server

Create a main.go file in your root folder:

package main

import (
	"log"
	"net/http"

	"your_project_module/tpl" // Replace with your actual project's module path
)

func main() {
	http.HandleFunc("/", func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
		name := "Developer"
		items := []string{"Go", "Gorazor", "Zero-alloc speed"}

		// Render index template directly to HTTP response writer
		tpl.RenderIndex(w, name, items)
	})

	log.Println("Server running at http://localhost:8080")
	if err := http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil); err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
}

Start the web server:

go run main.go

Open http://localhost:8080 in your browser to see your template rendered instantly.

5. Advanced Optimization & Features

A. HTML Compact Mode (Minification)

To minify the compiled HTML output, use the -compact flag during code generation:

gorazor -compact tpl tpl
  • What it does: Collapses excessive spaces, tabs, and newlines in HTML elements, stripping whitespaces between consecutive tags while keeping a single space between words.
  • Format Preservation: It automatically preserves whitespaces inside <pre>, <textarea>, <script>, and <style> blocks, ensuring Javascript logic and CSS formats remain fully intact.

B. Premium Codegen Diagnostics

gorazor comes with detailed syntax error reporting. If you make a mistake in a template, the compiler points out the exact file path, failing line number, and a highlighted visual code snippet:

compilation error in tpl/index.gohtml:14: failed to parse imports block: 14:9: missing import path
Context:
---> 14: import = 123

C. Skipping Line Numbers

To omit auto-generated line comment hints in generated code (e.g. // Line: 12), use the -noline flag:

gorazor -noline tpl tpl