Admittedly I'm probably just not the best programmer in the world, but I just copy and paste something like this:

if err := c.ShouldBindHeader(&headers); err != nil { log.Println(err.Error()) c.JSON(http.StatusUnauthorized, gin.H{"error": err.Error()}) return }

I don't think I give any more or less thought about it overall. Honestly, I'd probably rather just write the happy path, but still like the language either way.