• Stars
    star
    267
  • Rank 153,621 (Top 4 %)
  • Language
    Go
  • License
    BSD 3-Clause "New...
  • Created over 11 years ago
  • Updated about 1 year ago

Reviews

There are no reviews yet. Be the first to send feedback to the community and the maintainers!

Repository Details

Package gorilla/http is an alternative HTTP client implementation for Go.

gorilla/http

A simple, safe and powerful HTTP client for the Go language.

Build Status: Build Status

Image of an under construction GIF

This project is experimental. We welcome contributors and early adopters if you're feeling brave.

Introduction

Why does Go need a new HTTP client, the standard library already has one ?

The Go net/http package is excellent. It is fast, efficient, gets the job done, and comes batteries included with every Go installation. At the same time the net/http package is a victim of its own success. The Go 1 contract defines many fields in the net/http types which are redundant or surplus.

Similarly the success of the net/http package has enshrined bugs which cannot be changed due to the growing amount of software written to expect that behaviour.

Client only

One acknowledged shortcoming of the net/http package is its reuse of core types between server and client implementations.

At one level this is admirable, HTTP messages; requests and responses, are more alike than they are different so it makes good engineering sense to reuse their logic where possible. However, combined with the Go 1 contract, this has lead to compromises.

gorilla/http is a client implementation only. This allows us to focus on a set of layered types which encapsulate the complete request flow from the client point of view without compromise.

Specific features

This section addresses specific limitations of the net/http package and discusses the gorilla/http alternatives.

Timeouts

Timeouts are critically important. By dint of the Go 1 contract, timeouts have been bolted on to the net/http implementation where possible. gorilla/http will go further and implement timeouts for as many operations as possible; connection, request send, response headers, response body, total request/response time, keepalive, etc.

Closing Response Bodies

Forgetting to close a Response.Body is a continual problem for Gophers. It would be wonderful to create a client which does not require the response body to be closed, however this appears impossible to marry with the idea of connection reuse and pooling.

Instead gorilla/http will address this in two ways

  1. The high level functions in the gorilla/http package do not return types that require closing. For example, gorilla/http.Get(w io.Writer, url string) mirrors the interface of io.Copy and should be sufficient for many REST style http calls which exchange small messages.
  2. At the http.Client layer, methods will return an io.ReadCloser, not a complex Response type. This io.ReadCloser must be closed before falling out of scope otherwise the client will panic the application.

Connection rate limiting

Rate limiting in terms of number of total connections in use, number of connections to a particular site will be controllable. By default gorilla/http will only use a reasonable number of concurrent connections.

gorilla/http has a strictly layered design where the high level gorilla/http package is responsible for request composition and connection management and the lower level gorilla/http/client package is strictly responsible for the http transaction and the lowest level wire format.

Reliable DNS lookups

gorilla/http will use an alternative DNS resolver library to avoid the limitations of the system libc resolver library.

Robustness and correctness

As a client only package, gorilla/http has flexibility to bias correctness over performance. Gorilla will always favor correctness of implementation over performance, and we believe this is the correct trade off. Having said that performance is a feature and gorilla/http strives to keep its overheads compared to the underlying network transit cost as low as possible.

Roadmap

The roadmap for the project is captured as open issues in GitHub.

Contributions and feedback

Please raise issues and suggestions on the GitHub project page, https://github.com/gorilla/http/issues.

Questions and discussion can also be directed to the general Gorilla mailing list https://groups.google.com/group/gorilla-web.

Technical information

gorilla/http is divided into 4 layers. The topmost layer is a set of convenience functions layered on top of a default gorilla/http.Client instance. These package level functions are intended to satisfy simple HTTP requests and only cover the most common verbs and use cases.

The next layer is gorilla/http.Client which is a high level reusable HTTP client. It transparently manages connection pooling and reuse and provides both common verbs and a general purpose Client.Do() interface for uncommon http verbs.

The lower layers are inside the gorilla/http/client package and consist of types that deal with the abstract RFC2616 message form and marshal it on and off the wire.

Interestingly, although these are the lowest level types, they do not deal with net.Conn implementations, but io.ReadWriter, connection setup, management and timeout control is handled by the owner of the io.ReadWriter implementation passed to client.Client.

More Repositories

1

websocket

Package gorilla/websocket is a fast, well-tested and widely used WebSocket implementation for Go.
Go
21,832
star
2

mux

Package gorilla/mux is a powerful HTTP router and URL matcher for building Go web servers with 🦍
Go
20,537
star
3

sessions

Package gorilla/sessions provides cookie and filesystem sessions and infrastructure for custom session backends.
Go
2,829
star
4

handlers

Package gorilla/handlers is a collection of useful middleware for Go HTTP services & web applications 🛃
Go
1,640
star
5

schema

Package gorilla/schema fills a struct with form values.
Go
1,351
star
6

csrf

Package gorilla/csrf provides Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) prevention middleware for Go web applications & services 🔒
Go
1,024
star
7

feeds

Package gorilla/feeds is a golang rss/atom generator library
Go
732
star
8

securecookie

Package gorilla/securecookie encodes and decodes authenticated and optionally encrypted cookie values for Go web applications.
Go
682
star
9

rpc

Package gorilla/rpc is a golang foundation for RPC over HTTP services.
Go
581
star
10

context

Package gorilla/context is a golang registry for global request variables.
Go
431
star
11

pat

Package gorilla/pat is a pretty simple HTTP router for Go.
Go
153
star
12

css

Package gorilla/css is a CSS3 tokenizer.
Go
86
star
13

muxy

Package gorilla/muxy takes gorilla/mux to the next level
Go
74
star
14

gorilla.github.io

Gorilla web toolkit's website.
HTML
59
star
15

reverse

Package gorilla/reverse is a set of utilities to create request routers.
Go
53
star
16

i18n

Package gorilla/i18n groups packages related to internationalization
Go
49
star
17

template

A fork of the standard template packages.
Go
46
star
18

.github

The .github repository for the @gorilla organization.
9
star