So what does Pop do exactly? Well, it wraps the absolutely amazing https://github.com/jmoiron/sqlx library. It cleans up some of the common patterns and workflows usually associated with dealing with databases in Go.

Pop makes it easy to do CRUD operations, run migrations, and build/execute queries. Is Pop an ORM? I'll leave that up to you, the reader, to decide.

Pop is easily configured using a YAML file. The configuration file should be stored in config/database.yml or database.yml.

development:
  dialect: "postgres"
  database: "your_db_development"
  host: "localhost"
  port: "5432"
  user: "postgres"
  password: "postgres"

test:
  dialect: "mysql"
  database: "your_db_test"
  host: "localhost"
  port: "3306"
  user: "root"
  password: "root"

staging:
  dialect: "sqlite3"
  url: "./staging.sqlite"

production:
  dialect: "postgres"
  url: {{ env "DATABASE_URL" }}

Note that the database.yml file is also a Go template, so you can use Go template syntax. There are two special functions that are included, env and envOr.

• env - This function will look for the named environment variable and insert it into your file. This is useful for configuration production databases without having to store secret information in your repository. {{ env "DATABASE_URL" }}
• envOr - This function will look for the named environment variable and use it. If the variable can not be found a default value will be used. {{ envOr "MYSQL_HOST" "localhost" }}

Once you have a configuration file defined you can easily connect to one of these connections in your application.

db, err := pop.Connect("development")
if err != nil {
  log.Panic(err)
}

Now that you have your connection to the database you can start executing queries against it.