One of the most useful parts of Rails is Rake, designed by the late Jim Weirich it's essentially make but based in Ruby, the advantage being that you can run tasks in your native language, letting you manipulate data and state with your current app.

I love Makefiles. Most of my projects Ruby or otherwise seem to have a Makefile these days. I'm not sure why people seem to be scared of Makefiles; the syntax is easy, though I suppose the documentation at times is a little cryptic.

Famous Rails commands include rake db:migrate and rake test but these are simple to replace.

Database migrations are definitely a divisive and controversial topic amongst back enders but Rails has them and I've found that generally they are great, especially during development. There are several alternatives out there however, including ones that aren't even written in Go. We've been using Goose but I've added a few tasks to our Makefile that just use the wonderful built in PostgreSQL commands.

Testing via rake test has been replaced by Go's built in test command and library which is of a similar quality to Ruby's built in test library in that you might want some more assertions or similar, but these can still be invoked by the command go test

Generators via rake generate model x are missing in my workflow, but to be honest I wasn't a big user anyway since I seemed to spend more time removing the cruft than I would have done writing the original by hand, especially in such a terse language as Ruby.

When you're writing in Go you will spend quite a bit of time writing structs, especially when handling JSON. I noticed there are some tools like gojson out there to help you though!

If there is only one thing you take away from reading these posts, it should that go fmt is totally amazing. I kinda wish it existed for all my favourite languages!

Essentially you run go fmt on your code and your code is magically all perfectly formatted and conforms to the Go guidelines for writing code! Here's what the Go creators have to say about it.

Specifically I agree with the following points!

And this is how it looks in real life..

If you think go fmt is cool then checkout go imports! It's a great tool that blew my mind and made me super happy when I discovered it.

"This tool updates your Go import lines, adding missing ones and removing unreferenced ones."

If you've ever been debugging in Go only to be constantly interrupted by the compiler asking for you to remove or add the "log" import then this is for you!

Here's go imports working in real life via the great vim-go plugin..

I'm not going to talk about this for too long but I do understand that for many developers Rails' asset pipeline is very useful. We tend to favour our own stack, however, using tools like Browserify, Gulp and of course Makefiles.

Essentially nothing for us has changed when moving to Go in this area, as our Makefile or Gulpfile comes with us. In some ways it can be easier since we no longer have to remove the asset pipeline from Rails each time we start development.

In part 3 we'll talk about deployment and cross compiling your Go code to run on AWS or other environments. Perhaps we'll even talk about job queues and long running tasks!

What are the tools you would miss? Let me know via @alexrbarlow or talk on our HN comment thread here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9465687