Golang. What to use? http.ServeFile(..) or http.FileServer(..)?

Question

I\'m a little bit confused. Much of examples shows usage of both: http.ServeFile(..) and http.FileServer(..), but seems they have very close functi

Answer 1

Here a handler which sends a redirect to "/" if file is not found. This comes in handy when adding a fallback for an Angular application, as suggested here, which is served from within a golang service.

Note: This code is not production ready. Only illustrative (at best :-)

    package main

    import "net/http"

    type (
        // FallbackResponseWriter wraps an http.Requesthandler and surpresses
        // a 404 status code. In such case a given local file will be served.
        FallbackResponseWriter struct {
            WrappedResponseWriter http.ResponseWriter
            FileNotFound          bool
        }
    )

    // Header returns the header of the wrapped response writer
    func (frw *FallbackResponseWriter) Header() http.Header {
        return frw.WrappedResponseWriter.Header()
    }

    // Write sends bytes to wrapped response writer, in case of FileNotFound
    // It surpresses further writes (concealing the fact though)
    func (frw *FallbackResponseWriter) Write(b []byte) (int, error) {
        if frw.FileNotFound {
            return len(b), nil
        }
        return frw.WrappedResponseWriter.Write(b)
    }

    // WriteHeader sends statusCode to wrapped response writer
    func (frw *FallbackResponseWriter) WriteHeader(statusCode int) {
        Log.Printf("INFO: WriteHeader called with code %d\n", statusCode)
        if statusCode == http.StatusNotFound {
            Log.Printf("INFO: Setting FileNotFound flag\n")
            frw.FileNotFound = true
            return
        }
        frw.WrappedResponseWriter.WriteHeader(statusCode)
    }

    // AddFallbackHandler wraps the handler func in another handler func covering authentication
    func AddFallbackHandler(handler http.HandlerFunc, filename string) http.HandlerFunc {
        Log.Printf("INFO: Creating fallback handler")
        return func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
            Log.Printf("INFO: Wrapping response writer in fallback response writer")
            frw := FallbackResponseWriter{
                WrappedResponseWriter: w,
                FileNotFound:          false,
            }
            handler(&frw, r)
            if frw.FileNotFound {
                Log.Printf("INFO: Serving fallback")
                http.Redirect(w, r, "/", http.StatusSeeOther)
            }
        }
    }

It can be added as in this example (using goji as mux):

    mux.Handle(pat.Get("/*"),
        AddFallbackHandler(http.FileServer(http.Dir("./html")).ServeHTTP, "/"))