Introduction

gonest is a NestJS-inspired dependency-injection and HTTP framework for Go (github.com/gonest-dev/gonest). It gives Go the same developer experience that NestJS gives Node/TypeScript: modules, providers, controllers, a request pipeline (middleware/guard/interceptor/filter), and metadata-driven validation + OpenAPI generation — without giving up idiomatic Go.

Why gonest

Existing Go web frameworks (Gin, Echo, plain Fiber) force teams to relearn a mental model from scratch — no structured DI, no modules, no exception-to-HTTP-response convention. gonest replicates the Nest patterns that JS/TS developers already know, lowering the barrier for teams migrating a backend to Go.

Design philosophy

• No decorators, no struct tags for shape. Go has neither macros nor decorators, so gonest uses generics + builder functions (gonest.NewX(func(x *gonest.X) {...})) instead of @Decorator() syntax.
• Fields are identified by their own pointer. m.Property(&t.Id) uses the field's address — not a string name or a struct tag — so renames stay type-safe and refactor-proof.
• One declaration, multiple consumers. The same *Schema built via NewSchema[T] drives both runtime validation (MustParseRestXxx) and OpenAPI generation (Route.RequestBody/Route.Response) — never two parallel declarations to keep in sync.
• Zero magic in the hot path. Reflection is used only where Go genuinely requires it (e.g. reading a field's type via Property(&t.X)), never as a substitute for an explicit builder call.
• Three-phase bootstrap. Provider resolution → Controller declaration → Pipeline-stage declaration, so MustInject inside any builder is always a direct, already-resolved lookup — never a placeholder. See Bootstrap for details.

v1 scope

gonest v1 ships exactly one HttpAdapter: gonest.FiberApp (backed by Fiber v3). Multi-adapter support (net/http, Echo, Gin), CLI scaffolding, a microservices/transport layer, and GraphQL/gRPC are explicitly out of scope for v1.

Next steps