Do you want need a quick solution without going into the hassle of setting up a Database? If your answer to any of those questions was a yes, then you’ve come to the right place. This post will show you how you can use Google sheets as your database.

For the purposes of this blogpost I will be usiing this Google sheet.

As you can see, we will be collecting the following data from the user – Name, Email and Age.

Create the API

• Go to the google sheet you want to use.
• Create column headers in the first column
• Click on tools> script editor
• Copy the following code to the editor

• • Click on run>run function> setup.
  • Now publish your script to get the request URL with the following settings.
  • 

• Here is a video of me doing the above

Now let us test this URL in a webpage.

See the Pen
Simple register form by Thomas Ashish Cherian (@pandawhocodes)
on CodePen.

You can enter your details here to see your details being updated in the Google Sheet above( refresh to see changes) .

In this post we will build  simple REST API’s using the Go programming language. We will also be using the MUX Router. I will also explain some of the fundamentals of the language for beginners.

If you want to learn Go visit awesome-go-in-education. A curated list of resources about Go in Education. If you want to do the same but in Python read A simple guide to creating REST API’s with flask. I will be using Goland from jetbrains as my IDE.

Before we get started, a few jargon.

REST: a RESTful API uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data.

RESTful API designing: guidelines is a must read before you continue. It talks about terminologies, endpoints, versioning status codes and so much more.

Test your environment

Let us first test the environment to check if everything is working fine. For that we will be using a simple “Hello World” program.

Once that is done, let us import necessary packages.

Performing imports

Let us look at the imports used one by one.

1. encoding/json – since our API’s communications will be handled in JSON format
2. log – will log errors
3. net/http – We will use this package to create the API’s and communicate using HTTP protocols.
4. mux –  A powerful URL router and dispatcher for golang . A router is used to define which function will run when a particular endpoint(URL) is called.

Writing the main funciton

Do note  In Go, := is for declaration + assignment, whereas = is for assignment only.For example, var foo int = 10 is the same as foo := 10.

1. First we create a new variable for our multiplexer.
2. Then we use HandleFunc to define which function will handle which API endpoint.
3. With http.ListenAndServe we define the port that your program must listen to continuously.We wrap that around log.Fatal so that all exeptions are logged.

To run your code type the following in your console
go run main.go

If you face an error telling you that mux is not installed then run
go get -u github.com/gorilla/mux in your console.

Post Requests

Let us now post some data to the server.

Note: Click here to know more about json in Go.

1. Adding a new function and a function handler.

2.  Creating structs that will hold our json data.

3. Writing our add function.

Putting it all together

Hope this post helped you. If you want more help, feel free to ping me @Ashish_che