Whenever I want to set up a server for serving static files in Go, which is not often, I always have to spend some time to figure out the following one-liner.

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

What confuses me probably the most here is all three strings being practically the same.

So in this post I will explain what this does for my future-self so he won’t have to google about it and will have it explained here in a way he’ll like it. 🙂

For this particular example (where one-liner above applies) let’s say we are storing images in ./images folder on a server and accessing them from outside of the server with <server's domain>/images/article2.jpeg

• We shouldn’t set up a file server at root endpoint if our server accepts other endpoints.
• http.FileServer(http.Dir("./images"))) exposes folder ./images as a handler.
• http.StripPrefix is used because images are stored in ./images` folder and not in it’s subfolder images (we want ./images/article2.jpeg not ./images/images/article2.jpeg). It strips prefix from request’s URL.

A friendly reminder

Serving static files is more efficient using dedicated web server (Nginx, Apache,..). This approach also aids to better security of your application.