Embedding static files in Go

📅️ Last Updated: July 3, 2021 • 📅️ Published: February 1, 2021 • 🕣 3 min read

📌 go

Embedding static files in 2021 has become a bit easier since the release of Go 1.16. The new release comes with a new package embed which provides a handy set of interface and methods to attach static file in go binaries

Let’s have a short look at how to use this.

First of all you will need Go 1.16,

$ go get golang.org/dl/go1.16.15
$ go1.16.5 download
$ go1.16.5 version
go version go1.16.5

Head over to install instructions to install go binaries directly.

Now before we do anything, let’s create a project directory

$ mkdir embed-demo && cd $_
$ tree
.
├── assets
│   └── report.html
├── sample.txt
└── static-demo.go

Our code will be in static-demo.go

Go provides us with 3 ways to embed content:

On type string
On type byte
On type FS

Let’s explore each one of these one by one

package main

import (
	_ "embed"
	"fmt"
)

func main() {

    //go:embed sample.txt
    var s string
    fmt.Println(s)

}

To specify what variable holds our static file, go directive //go:embed is used followed by the name of file or a pattern to embed. Note that there must be no space between // and go because that is a regular one line comment in Go.

The //go:embed directive requires importing “embed”, even when using a string or []byte & since we are not referring to the embed module directly we are using a blank _ import. In our code we are embedding a text file sample.txt here is what it contains

This is a sample file
with multiple lines

and 🐧️ emojis too!

Now lets execute our code to see if actually works

$ go run static-demo.go
This is a sample file
with multiple lines

and 🐧️ emojis too!

Ok that’s pretty cool (dodge this Javascript!). Now lets see how to share some data to a text file

package main

import (
	"embed"
	"fmt"
	"html/template"
	"os"
)

func main() {
	//go:embed assets/*
	var assetData embed.FS
	t, err := template.ParseFS(assetData, "assets/report.html")
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Println(err)
	}
	templateData := struct {
		Title string
	}{
		Title: "File inside Go",
	}
	t.Execute(os.Stdout, templateData)
}

embed.FS enables us to embed a tree of static files i.e in our case the assets directory as dictated by the directive //go:embed assets/* which contains a file report.html with following contents

<html>
  <head>
    <title>{{$.Title}}</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Go is cool af!</h1>
  </body>
</html>

Patterns in the go directive cannot contain ‘.’ or ‘..’ path elements nor begin with a leading slash. To match everything in the current directory, use ‘*’

A FS (file system) in Go is a read-only collection of files, usually initialized with a //go:embed directive.

template.ParseFS takes a FS as first argument followed by a list of glob patterns,

Running this prints out our title correctly inside the HTML template.

$ go run static-demo.go 
<html>
  <head>
    <title>File inside Go</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Go is cool af!</h1>
  </body>
</html>

It worked!

Resources

embed - golang
You can also run go doc embed to view the documentaion locally