How do you serve a static html file using a go web server?

Question

How do you serve index.html (or some other static HTML file) using a go web server?

I just want a basic, static HTML file (like an article, for example) which I can serve from a go web server. The HTML should be modifiable outside of the go program, as it would be in the case while using HTML templates.

This is my web server which only hosts hard-coded text ("Hello world!").

package main

import (
  "fmt"
  "net/http"
)

func handler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
  fmt.Fprintf(w, "Hello world!")
}

func main() {
  http.HandleFunc("/", handler)
  http.ListenAndServe(":3000", nil)
}

Answer 1

That task is very easy with Golang net/http package.

All You need to do is:

package main

import (
        "net/http"
)

func main() {
        http.Handle("/", http.FileServer(http.Dir("./static")))
        http.ListenAndServe(":3000", nil)
}

assuming that static files are in folder named static in the root directory of the project.

If it's in folder static, you'll have index.html file calling http://localhost:3000/ which will result in rendering that index file instead of listing all the files availible.

Additionally, calling any other file in that folder (for example http://localhost:3000/clients.html) will show that file, properly rendered by the browser (at least Chrome, Firefox and Safari :))

UPDATE: serving files from url different than "/"

If You want to serve files, say from folder ./public under url: localhost:3000/static You have to use additional function: func StripPrefix(prefix string, h Handler) Handler like this:

package main

import (
        "net/http"
)

func main() {
        http.Handle("/static/", http.StripPrefix("/static/", http.FileServer(http.Dir("./public"))))
        http.ListenAndServe(":3000", nil)
}

Thanks to that, all your files from ./public are avalible under localhost:3000/static

Without http.StripPrefix function, if you would try to access file localhost:3000/static/test.html, the server would look for it in ./public/static/test.html

This is because the server treats the whole URI as a relative path to the file.

Fortunately, it's easily solved with the built-in function.

Answer 2

I prefer using http.ServeFile for this over http.FileServer. I wanted directory browsing disabled, a proper 404 if files are missing and an easy way to special case the index file. This way, you can just drop the built binary into a folder and it will serve everything relative to that binary. Of course, you can use strings.Replace on p if you have the files stored in another directory.

func main() {
    fmt.Println("Now Listening on 80")
    http.HandleFunc("/", serveFiles)
    log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(":80", nil))
}

func serveFiles(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    fmt.Println(r.URL.Path)
    p := "." + r.URL.Path
    if p == "./" {
        p = "./static/index.html"
    }
    http.ServeFile(w, r, p)
}