I'm working on a small web application in Go that's meant to be used as a tool on a developer's machine to help debug their applications/web services. The interface to the program is a web page which includes not only the HTML, but some JavaScript (for functionality), images and CSS (for styling). I'm planning on open-sourcing this application, so users should simply be able to run a Makefile and all the resources will go where they need to go. However, I'd also like to be able to simply distribute an executable with as few files/dependencies as possible. Is there a good way to bundle the HTML/CSS/JS with the executable, so users only have to download and worry about one file?
Right now, in my app, serving a static file looks a little like this:
// called via http.ListenAndServe
func switchboard(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
// snipped dynamic routing...
// look for static resource
uri := r.URL.RequestURI()
if fp, err := os.Open("static" + uri); err == nil {
defer fp.Close()
staticHandler(w, r, fp)
return
}
// snipped blackhole route
}
So it's pretty simple: if the requested file exists in my static directory, invoke the handler, which simply opens the file and tries to set a good Content-Type before serving. My thought was that there's no reason this needs to be based on the real filesystem: if there were compiled resources, I could simply index them by the request URI and serve them as such.
If there's not a good way to do this, or I'm barking up the wrong tree by trying to do this, let me know. I just figured the end-user would appreciate as few files as possible to manage.
If there are more appropriate tags than go, please feel free to add them or let me know.
