Go Ways
How to Embed React App into Go Binary
All that is mine I carry with me
Image that you have an amazing project with React app, and you want to distribute and deploy it along with you Go application.
Let’s say that it is a super cool LikeIt! project, and it allows to like a page ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
01 Project structure
First, lets review the project structure.
In the root of the project we have the main.go file. This is the entry point and keeps all the go code.
- main.go — is in the root of the project and this is an entry point for our Go app.
- /web — directory keeps code and assets for the React app.
- /web/dist — is an empty directory that will keep built web assets.
For this example I‘m using Parcel to build a web part.
02 Go “embed” package
Since go-1.16 standard library includes embed package. This package provides access to files embedded in the running Go program.
With the usage of //go:embed directive, we can initialize a variable of type string, []byte, or FS. A variable can keep content of the file or the whole directory.
For more examples check the package documentation.
03 How to serve static files
Embed package implements FS interface, so it can be used with any package that understands file systems, including net/http, text/template, and html/template.
That means that we can use built-in http.FileServer to serve our embedded files.
04 Results
As the result we can build a Go binary that keeps all our static files.
➜ likeit git:(main) ✗ go build -o bin/likeit main.go
➜ likeit git:(main) ✗ ls -lh bin/likeit
-rwxr-xr-x 1 pavel-fokin staff 6.6M Jul 23 16:48 bin/likeitAnd it can be deployed as heroku app -> likeit-click.
Full code you can find in my GitHub repo pavel-fokin/likeit.
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Further readings
If you like this article you can be interested in the following.
