Getting Started with Gorilla MUX

This is going to be short and sweet. I have been looking at getting into Go for awhile but lacked incentive. That has, as of a week ago, changed and it’s full speed ahead.

For this I will be using Gorilla MUX. If you haven’t taken a look at the Gorilla toolkit yet I highly recommend it. I really enjoy using it, the use as individual components really resonates with me and my style of coding.

Setup

Setup for this is pretty fast, go get github.com/gorilla/mux

The Meat and Potatos

The main.go for this is pretty simple, but if you haven’t used net/http from the Golang standard library you might be scratching your head trying to figure out what’s going on.

Example main.go

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "github.com/gorilla/mux"
    "net/http"
)

func ArticleHandler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    fmt.Println("Article URI")
}

func main() {
    // Create a new Router instance
    router := mux.NewRouter()

    // Add the URI /article to be handled by the ArticleHandler method
    router.HandleFunc("/article", ArticleHandler)
    
    // Add the URI / to be handled by a closure
    router.HandleFunc("/", func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
        fmt.Println("Root URI")
    })

    // Pass our router to net/http
    http.Handle("/", router)
    
    // Listen and serve on localhost:8080
    http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
}

Alright, that’s cool so what do we do with it?

Well, sounds like a great way build a back end service and a separate front end application using something like AngularJS.

Next article I will go into more detail. Until then, you can check out the code for this series here: HelloBlog

As always, if there are errors or you have a suggestion send me a message.