Building a Robust Error Notification System with Golang and Notify

What is Notify?

Notify is a lightweight Go library for sending notifications to various messaging services, including email, Slack, and more. It provides a platform-independent interface for triggering actions or implementing notification systems.

Comparison with Sentry

Sentry is a cloud-based error tracking platform that helps developers track and fix errors in their applications. While Sentry is a powerful tool, it serves a different purpose than Notify. Notify is designed for sending notifications to multiple messaging services, whereas Sentry is focused on error tracking and analysis.

Prerequisites

• Golang installed on your system
• An IDE or text editor of your choice (e.g., Visual Studio Code or Sublime Text)

Setting up the Project

Our project will consist of a simple internal error notification system that logs errors and sends notifications to email and Slack. We’ll use the following stack:

• Svelte for the frontend
• Go’s Echo framework for the backend

Setting up the Backend and Services

We’ll create a file called alert.go to handle error logging, sending notifications, and API endpoints for the dashboard. We’ll also set up our services, including email and Slack, using the Notify library.

Adding Services to Notify

Before adding services to Notify, we need to instantiate each service library, which requires API keys or other settings. We can add services using the UseServices() method.

package main

import (
	"github.com/notify/notify"
	"github.com/notify/notify/services/email"
	"github.com/notify/notify/services/slack"
)

func main() {
	// Create a new Notify instance
	n := notify.New()

	// Add email and Slack services
	emailSvc := email.New("your_email_api_key")
	slackSvc := slack.New("your_slack_api_key")

	n.UseServices(emailSvc, slackSvc)
}

Sending Notifications

Once we’ve added our services, we can send notifications using the Notify library.

func main() {
	// ...

	// Send a notification
	n.Notify("Error occurred!", "This is an error message.")
}

Logger

The logger function handles the delivery of error messages to various services. It also allows us to log the message to a file, which is served to our dashboard via an endpoint.

Using Svelte and Tailwind CSS for the Frontend

We’ll set up Svelte for the frontend and use Tailwind CSS to create a simple and responsive dashboard.

Setting up the Test Environment

We’ll implement a test environment to test our project and its integration. We’ll create a page that links to alert.Log(), which captures and logs all page errors.