Aren't there a lot of required packages to build a webapp? I would recommend against using any of those at least in the beginning. Maybe gorilla/mux, but even that can be avoided.

Don't just add deps you will never use, it's going to make your life painful.

Mux is also possibly surplus, but does tidy up the extraction of values from routes a little. But to be totally honest the given example isn't complex enough to start letting Mux shine (multiple values on URLs, a single app serving both http and https).

Blackfriday (for Markdown) is necessary if you want to convert your text input into HTML, though there is a missing dependency here which is Bluemonday.

Bluemonday ( https://github.com/microcosm-cc/bluemonday ) is a HTML sanitizer and ensures that XSS supplied via the Markdown box is stripped before rendering - I wrote that, it's based on the whitelisting approach as demonstrated by the OWASP Java HTML Sanitizer. Blackfriday even recommends you clean your untrusted inputs: https://github.com/russross/blackfriday#sanitize-untrusted-c...

SQLite3 is required, or at least some SQL provider is going to be required if the tutorial wants to fully demonstrate actually saving content and using one of the established interfaces (database/sql) to do so.

So you could reduce this to three deps: Blackfriday, Bluemonday, SQLite3 and stick to core/stdlib http for the actual "web app in Go" stuff.

The other deps, it is debatable whether or not they are essential, certainly the larger web apps will find that they are simplified and easier to read and work with by using some combination of Mux, Negroni and Controller depending on your needs. Render I have not used and do not have a strong opinion on.