Moving from Revel to Mars in 7 steps

1. Add the dependency:
2. Add github.com/roblillack/mars to your depedencies using the Go vendoring tool of your choice, or
3. Add said repository as a git submodule, or
4. Just run go get github.com/roblillack/mars (which is Go's “I'm feeling lucky” button)
5. Replace all occurences of the revel package with mars. This will mainly be import paths and action results (mars.Result instead of revel.Result), but also things like accessing the config or logging. You can pretty much automate this.
6. Fix the case for some of the rendering functions your code might call:
7. RenderJson -> RenderJSON
8. RenderJsonP -> RenderJSONP
9. RenderXml -> RenderXML
10. RenderHtml -> RenderHTML
11. Set a Key for all validation result, because Mars will not guess this based on variable names. Something like c.Validation.Required(email) becomes c.Validation.Required(email).Key("email")
12. Install mars-gen using go get github.com/roblillack/mars/cmd/mars-gen and set it up for controller registration and reverse route generation by adding comments like these to one of Go files:

    //go:generate mars-gen register-controllers ./controllers
    //go:generate mars-gen reverse-routes -n routes -o routes/routes.gen.go ./controllers
    

Make sure to check in the generated sources, too. Run mars-gen --help for usage info. 6. Setup a main entry point for your server, for example like this:

   package main

   import (
       "flag"
       "path"
       "github.com/mycompany/myapp/controllers"
       "github.com/roblillack/mars"
   )

   func main() {
       mode := flag.String("m", "prod", "Runtime mode to select (default: prod)")
       flag.Parse()

       // This is the function `mars-gen register-controllers` generates:
       controllers.RegisterControllers()

       // Setup some paths to be compatible with the Revel way. Default is not to have an "app" directory below BasePath
       mars.ViewsPath = path.Join("app", "views")
       mars.ConfigFile = path.Join("app", "conf", "app.conf")
       mars.RoutesFile = path.Join("app", "conf", "routes")

       // Ok, we should never, ever, ever disable CSRF protection.
       // But to stay compatible with Revel's defaults ....
       // Read https://godoc.org/github.com/roblillack/mars#CSRFFilter about what to do to enable this again.
       mars.DisableCSRF = true

       // Reads the config, sets up template loader, creates router
       mars.InitDefaults(mode, ".")

       mars.Run()
   }

1. Run go generate && go build && ./myapp and be happy.