Level Up Your Go Web Server: Mastering Advanced Routing with net/http

Building robust and maintainable web applications in Go often hinges on how effectively you manage incoming HTTP requests. While Go’s built-in net/http package provides foundational tools, its advanced routing features empower you to create sophisticated and organized application logic. This article will guide you through practical code examples for path parameters, HTTP method constraints, host-based routing, middleware, sub-routing, and context-elevating your Go web server development.

It’s clear what we are trying to achieve, so let’s consider the requirements. Firstly, we need a tool to render web pages since JavaScript is commonly used nowadays. Secondly, we require an API to communicate with the headless browser. Lastly, saving the result can be challenging as browsers are designed to interact with rendered results rather than directly with the source code.

Headless browser

So we are looking for a headless browser. We are going to use Chrome’s headless-shell because it’s easy to use, and it’s based on Chromium . The most significant advantage is docker image, which we can efficiently run on our local machine or anywhere in the cloud.

For a while I was looking for an easy we to test my lambda functions written in golang locally. We have awesome tools like LocalStack but this is not what I was looking for. I wanted to test my lambda function locally, without any dependencies. Something lighter without Docker . I will show you how to do that.

I have been avoiding Amazon DynamoDB for a long time. Each time I tried to use it, either with PHP or GoLang always gave up very quickly. A while ago, I built up a solution storing a lot of JSON files on S3 buckets, and the costs of this solution (number of GET requests) started to escalate very quickly. I decided to try to migrate data to DynamoDB, and this time I was successful. I will try to explain how I did it and what I learned along the way.

Postman, it’s a great tool for debuging, testing and other activities performed by us - developers. It has a build in option to sign requestes with AWS Signature . We do have AWS SDK for Go v2 , but I couldn’t find any good examples except a test file . The other useful file will be const.go where we can find a couple of interesting variables.