Golang serve static files from memory
I have a quick question about serving files in Go. There is the great timesaving FileServer handler, but for my use case, I only have 2 or 3 files (js and css) that go with my app and I dont want to complicate the deployment to have to think about those.
Do you think there is an easy way to build those couple of files into the binary and serve them from there. For example base64 encode the data of the files as constants and server the files from the constants. This would work in its most simple form, but I dont want to go through the pain of doing everything that a file server does (headers, expiries, mime-types, etc) on my own. So would there be an easy way to bake those static files into the binary in some form and serve them that way?
Answer
The FileServer requires a FileSystem object in its constructor. Usually, you would provide something based on http.Dir to make that FileSystem for you from the actual file system, but nothing prevents you from implementing your own:
package main
import "os"
import "time"
import "net/http"
type InMemoryFS map[string]http.File
// Implements FileSystem interface
func (fs InMemoryFS) Open(name string) (http.File, error) {
if f, ok := fs[name]; ok {
return f, nil
}
panic("No file")
}
type InMemoryFile struct {
at int64
Name string
data []byte
fs InMemoryFS
}
func LoadFile(name string, val string, fs InMemoryFS) *InMemoryFile {
return &InMemoryFile{at: 0,
Name: name,
data: []byte(val),
fs: fs}
}
// Implements the http.File interface
func (f *InMemoryFile) Close() error {
return nil
}
func (f *InMemoryFile) Stat() (os.FileInfo, error) {
return &InMemoryFileInfo{f}, nil
}
func (f *InMemoryFile) Readdir(count int) ([]os.FileInfo, error) {
res := make([]os.FileInfo, len(f.fs))
i := 0
for _, file := range f.fs {
res[i], _ = file.Stat()
i++
}
return res, nil
}
func (f *InMemoryFile) Read(b []byte) (int, error) {
i := 0
for f.at < int64(len(f.data)) && i < len(b) {
b[i] = f.data[f.at]
i++
f.at++
}
return i, nil
}
func (f *InMemoryFile) Seek(offset int64, whence int) (int64, error) {
switch whence {
case 0:
f.at = offset
case 1:
f.at += offset
case 2:
f.at = int64(len(f.data)) + offset
}
return f.at, nil
}
type InMemoryFileInfo struct {
file *InMemoryFile
}
// Implements os.FileInfo
func (s *InMemoryFileInfo) Name() string { return s.file.Name }
func (s *InMemoryFileInfo) Size() int64 { return int64(len(s.file.data)) }
func (s *InMemoryFileInfo) Mode() os.FileMode { return os.ModeTemporary }
func (s *InMemoryFileInfo) ModTime() time.Time { return time.Time{} }
func (s *InMemoryFileInfo) IsDir() bool { return false }
func (s *InMemoryFileInfo) Sys() interface{} { return nil }
const HTML = `<html>
Hello world !
</html>
`
const CSS = `
p {
color:red;
text-align:center;
}
`
func main() {
FS := make(InMemoryFS)
FS["foo.html"] = LoadFile("foo.html", HTML, FS)
FS["bar.css"] = LoadFile("bar.css", CSS, FS)
http.Handle("/", http.FileServer(FS))
http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
}
This implementation is very buggy at best, and you should probably never ever use it, but it should show you how the FileSystem interface can be implemented for arbitrary 'files'.
A more credible (and certainly less dangerous) implementation of something similar is available here. This is the one used to fake the filesystem on Go playground, so it should be a good reference (much better than mine anyway).
Whether it is simpler to reimplement this FileSystem interface or a custom FileServer as other suggested, is entirely up to you and your project ! I suspect however that for serving a couple of predefined files, rewriting the serving part might be easier than emulating a full file-system.