Rendering CSS in a Go Web Application

Question

I wrote a very basic web application, following this tutorial. I want to add css rules in an external stylesheet, but it's not working - when the HTML templates are rendered, something goes wrong and the CSS is completely ignored. If I put the rules in tags, it works, but I don't want to have to deal with that.

In a Go web application, how do I render an external CSS stylesheet?

Viscounty

Are you sure the path to your CSS file that you are linking is correct? Can you comment the <link> tag you are using to link to your stylesheet? – Environment

The rest of my code looks exactly like this: golang.org/doc/articles/wiki/final.go plus two html files that are the templates (edit.html and view.html). Everything's in the same folder. This is my <link> tag: <link rel = "stylesheet" style = "text/css" href = "css_1.css"> – Viscounty

Can you update the question with your CSS? If you have any syntax errors (i.e., missing colons) in the CSS it can cause the whole thing not to render properly. – Environment

Well, I'm not on that machine right now but maybe I will I am. Thibg is, I copied the CSS directly into style tags and it worked fine, but as soon as I put it in link tags and an external stylesheet it stopped working. – Viscounty

Answer 1

Add a handler to handle serving static files from a specified directory.

eg. create {server.go directory}/resources/ and use

http.Handle("/resources/", http.StripPrefix("/resources/", http.FileServer(http.Dir("resources")))) 

along with /resources/somethingsomething.css

The reason for using StripPrefix is that you can change the served directory as you please, but keep the reference in HTML the same.

eg. to serve from /home/www/

http.Handle("/resources/", http.StripPrefix("/resources/", http.FileServer(http.Dir("/home/www/"))))

Note that this will leave the resources directory listing open. If you want to prevent that, there is a good snippet on the go snippet blog:

http://gosnip.posterous.com/disable-directory-listing-with-httpfileserver

Edit: Posterous is now gone, so I just pulled the code off of the golang mailing list and will post it here.

type justFilesFilesystem struct {
    fs http.FileSystem
}

func (fs justFilesFilesystem) Open(name string) (http.File, error) {
    f, err := fs.fs.Open(name)
    if err != nil {
        return nil, err
    }
    return neuteredReaddirFile{f}, nil
}

type neuteredReaddirFile struct {
    http.File
}

func (f neuteredReaddirFile) Readdir(count int) ([]os.FileInfo, error) {
    return nil, nil
}

Original post discussing it: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-nuts/bStLPdIVM6w

And use it like this in place of the line above:

 fs := justFilesFilesystem{http.Dir("resources/")}
 http.Handle("/resources/", http.StripPrefix("/resources/", http.FileServer(fs)))

Blastema

Works. I had to refresh with ctrl+shift+r in Firefox – Paviour

@Paviour Gotta not load from cache ;) – Montford