Create User

We've written the SQL query, now it's time to write the API handler that will allow users to create a new user.

The Context Package

The context package is a part of Go's standard library. It does several things, but the most important thing is that it handles timeouts. All of SQLC's database queries accept a context.Context as their first argument:

user, err := cfg.db.CreateUser(r.Context(), params.Email)

By passing your handler's http.Request.Context() to the query, the library will automatically cancel the database query if the HTTP request is canceled or times out.

The benefit is that it will save your server from getting bogged down by long-running queries!

Assignment

Add a new endpoint to your server POST /api/users that allows users to be created. It accepts an email as JSON in the request body and returns the user's ID, email, and timestamps in the response body.

Request:

{
  "email": "[email protected]"
}

Response:

HTTP 201 Created

{
  "id": "50746277-23c6-4d85-a890-564c0044c2fb",
  "created_at": "2021-07-07T00:00:00Z",
  "updated_at": "2021-07-07T00:00:00Z",
  "email": "[email protected]"
}

Update the POST /admin/reset endpoint to delete all users in the database (but don't mess with the schema). You'll need a new SQLC query for this. Add a new value to your .env file called PLATFORM and set it equal to "dev". Read it into your apiConfig. If PLATFORM is not equal to "dev", this endpoint should return a 403 Forbidden. This ensures that this extremely dangerous endpoint can only be accessed in a local development environment.

Run and submit the CLI tests.

Tips

I created a User struct in my main package. When the database package returns a database.User, I map it to my main package's User struct before marshalling it to JSON so that I can control the JSON keys:

type User struct {
	ID        uuid.UUID `json:"id"`
	CreatedAt time.Time `json:"created_at"`
	UpdatedAt time.Time `json:"updated_at"`
	Email     string    `json:"email"`
}

Alternatively, you can use the 'emit_json_tags` configuration option to automatically include the JSON tags. However, in larger projects, this may be more restrictive than useful.