Go by Example: HTTP Clients

The Go standard library comes with excellent support for HTTP clients and servers in the net/http package. In this example we’ll use it to issue simple HTTP requests.

package main
import (
    "bufio"
    "fmt"
    "net/http"
)
func main() {

Issue an HTTP GET request to a server. http.Get is a convenient shortcut around creating an http.Client object and calling its Get method; it uses the http.DefaultClient object which has useful default settings.

    resp, err := http.Get("https://gobyexample.com")
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }
    defer resp.Body.Close()

Print the HTTP response status.

    fmt.Println("Response status:", resp.Status)

Print the first 5 lines of the response body.

    scanner := bufio.NewScanner(resp.Body)
    for i := 0; scanner.Scan() && i < 5; i++ {
        fmt.Println(scanner.Text())
    }
    if err := scanner.Err(); err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }
}
$ go run http-clients.go
Response status: 200 OK
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>Go by Example</title>

Next example: HTTP Servers.