Introduction

Building a basic web server is an essential first step for anyone learning web application development. This article will guide you through creating a basic web server in Golang.

Prerequisites

To benefit from this article, you will need the following:

• Go installed (version 1.16 or later)
• Basic knowledge of the Go programming language

Table of Contents:

• Creating a Simple Web Server
• Exploring More Web Server Features
• Running and Testing
• Conclusion

Creating a Simple Web Server

Let’s start by creating a basic web server using the net/http package from the Go standard library.

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "net/http"
)

func main() {
    http.HandleFunc("/", handler)
    fmt.Println("Starting server on :8080")
    http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
}

func handler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    fmt.Fprint(w, "Hello, World!")
}

Exploring More Web Server Features

While our web server is currently very basic, there are several additional features we can add:

• We can set custom routes for different webpage paths
• We can implement reading from and writing to the request and response bodies

For now, we will continue using our simple "Hello, World!" response handler.

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "net/http"
)

func main() {
    http.HandleFunc("/", handler)

    server := &http.Server{
        Addr: ":8080",
    }

    fmt.Println("Starting server on :8080")
    if err := server.ListenAndServe(); err != nil {
        fmt.Println("Error serving:", err)
    }
}

func handler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    fmt.Fprint(w, "Hello, World!")
}

Running and Testing

To run and test our web server, we can use the following steps:

Compile and run the server:

go build server.go
./server

In a separate terminal or a web browser, navigate to http://localhost:8080, and you should see the "Hello, World!" message.

Conclusion

We have demonstrated how to build a basic web server in Golang. This server listens for incoming connections and serves a simple "Hello, World!" message to the client. While this server is basic, it is a solid foundation for more complex applications built using Golang.