Go is a popular programming language that is known for its simplicity, concurrency support, and performance. It is a great choice for building web servers and APIs. In this article, we will explore how to create a web server using Go.
Prerequisites
Before you begin, you need to have Go installed on your system. You can download and install it from the official website. Once you have Go installed, you can verify the installation by running the following command in your terminal:
go version
This should output the version of Go that you have installed on your system.
Creating a Basic Web Server
The first step to creating a web server in Go is to import the net/http package, which provides a set of functions and types for building HTTP servers and clients. Then, you can define a handler function that will be executed whenever an HTTP request is received by the server. Here is an example of a simple handler function:
func helloHandler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
fmt.Fprintf(w, "Hello, World!")
}
The http.ResponseWriter the parameter is used to write the response that will be sent back to the client and the http.Request the parameter contains information about the incoming request.
Next, you need to create an HTTP server and register the handler function with the server. Here is an example of how to do this:
func main() {
http.HandleFunc("/", helloHandler)
http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
}
The http.HandleFunc function is used to register the helloHandler function with the server. The first parameter is the path that the handler function will be registered for, and the second parameter is the handler function itself.
The http.ListenAndServe function is used to start the server and listen for incoming requests. The first parameter is the address that the server will listen on (in this case, port 8080), and the second parameter is the handler that will be used to handle incoming requests. By passing in nil as the second parameter, we are telling the server to use the default HTTP handler, which is the http.DefaultServeMux multiplexer.
Testing the Web Server
Now that we have created a web server, we can test it by sending an HTTP request to the server. You can do this by opening a web browser and navigating to http://localhost:8080/. You should see the text "Hello, World!" displayed in the browser.