service VS Listmonk

Ultimate Service was useful for me. None of the "backend" concepts were new, but you get to see how Bill would layout/design an API-based service. If you're experienced you'll notice the opinionated choices he makes, and I found myself saying "Nah, I'm not sure I'd do it like that". I appreciated its use of Kubernetes and KIND as I'd never played with them before. How he uses Docker to spin up a DB instance for tests is pretty cool. There's a lot of copy & paste as you code along with him (you copy from the "finished project" and paste into your work in progress). The full example project is online at https://github.com/ardanlabs/service. You won't write all that code, and this version is newer than the one I did, but it gives you an idea of what you might learn.

So what can you do insted? For testing databases, setup a docker instance for tests (e.g. like in https://github.com/ardanlabs/service), or start an embedded-postgres daemon (see https://github.com/fergusstrange/embedded-postgres). For communication with external APIs, just pass the http.Client (either in context.Context or as a field on the struct). Then in tests, you can override the http.Client.Transport func.

Take a look at https://github.com/ardanlabs/service from Bill Kennedy. You can probably simplify the structure a bit since your project is minimal, but that repo is gold.

Checkout https://github.com/ardanlabs/service for inporation. Tip: try to avoid creating a service package with all services, a domain package with all domain structs, etc.

Or go through this repo https://github.com/ardanlabs/service

I've seen this handler modification and wrapping pattern in Ardan Labs' service repository. https://github.com/ardanlabs/service/tree/master/foundation/web

https://github.com/ardanlabs/service This is something which I really like and has taken into account a lot of engineering decisions.

I have mainly name and email fields in the newsletter signup and there is no verification. Then I manually blacklisted all the bots in the email service Listmonk.

Listmonk – An open-source alternative to Mailchimp just released version 3. It’s great as a stand-alone newsletter. Also seems like a low lift for capturing leads for side projects.

Here is another great self hosted solution that I came across. Really high performance (written in Go). No affiliation but well done open source product.

https://listmonk.app

When I searched for this I had a very hard time finding a right answer because all the results were SEO blogs advertising their newsletter services (Mailchimp, Convertkit, etc.), which is not the same thing.

So I wrote this overview covering all the options I found. Additional input is welcome.

Even though Listmonk seems like the best free & open source option, there aren't many guides for it and the documentation is quite limited. So [I've been having trouble getting it running on a CentOS server](https://github.com/knadh/listmonk/issues/1004#issuecomment-1...).

It's a shame that it seems to be used by thousands of people but almost no one bothers to create guides or improve the docs.