A static file server in Go

If you don’t know Go, you should really look into it. Today I was trying to figure out how to write a simple (and fast) static file server in Go.

As it turns out, this is very easy to do. Go contains (in the net/http package) a nice FileServer type that can server files from the directory you point it to.

Here’s a sweet and short example:

package main

import (
    "net/http"
    "log"
)

func main() {
    err := http.ListenAndServe(":4242", http.FileServer(http.Dir("public")))
    if err != nil {
        log.Printf("Error running web server for static assets: %v", err)
    }
}

By itself this is not very useful, but you can easily integrate this into any other http server you create, maybe for handling dynamic requests or doing web sockets.