mux

gorilla/mux

Package gorilla/mux implements a request router and dispatcher for matching incoming requests to their respective handler.

The name mux stands for "HTTP request multiplexer". Like the standard http.ServeMux, mux.Router matches incoming requests against a list of registered routes and calls a handler for the route that matches the URL or other conditions. The main features are:

• It implements the http.Handler interface so it is compatible with the standard http.ServeMux.
• Requests can be matched based on URL host, path, path prefix, schemes, header and query values, HTTP methods or using custom matchers.
• URL hosts, paths and query values can have variables with an optional regular expression.
• Registered URLs can be built, or "reversed", which helps maintaining references to resources.
• Routes can be used as subrouters: nested routes are only tested if the parent route matches. This is useful to define groups of routes that share common conditions like a host, a path prefix or other repeated attributes. As a bonus, this optimizes request matching.

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• Install
• Examples
• Matching Routes
• Static Files
• Serving Single Page Applications (e.g. React, Vue, Ember.js, etc.)
• Registered URLs
• Walking Routes
• Graceful Shutdown
• Middleware
• Handling CORS Requests
• Testing Handlers
• Full Example

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Install

With a correctly configured Go toolchain:

go get -u github.com/gorilla/mux

Examples

Let's start registering a couple of URL paths and handlers:

func main() {
    r := mux.NewRouter()
    r.HandleFunc("/", HomeHandler)
    r.HandleFunc("/products", ProductsHandler)
    r.HandleFunc("/articles", ArticlesHandler)
    http.Handle("/", r)
}

Here we register three routes mapping URL paths to handlers. This is equivalent to how http.HandleFunc() works: if an incoming request URL matches one of the paths, the corresponding handler is called passing (http.ResponseWriter, *http.Request) as parameters.

Paths can have variables. They are defined using the format {name} or {name:pattern}. If a regular expression pattern is not defined, the matched variable will be anything until the next slash. For example:

r := mux.NewRouter()
r.HandleFunc("/products/{key}", ProductHandler)
r.HandleFunc("/articles/{category}/", ArticlesCategoryHandler)
r.HandleFunc("/articles/{category}/{id:[0-9]+}", ArticleHandler)

The names are used to create a map of route variables which can be retrieved calling mux.Vars():

func ArticlesCategoryHandler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    vars := mux.Vars(r)
    w.WriteHeader(http.StatusOK)
    fmt.Fprintf(w, "Category: %v\n", vars["category"])
}

And this is all you need to know about the basic usage. More advanced options are explained below.

Matching Routes

Routes can also be restricted to a domain or subdomain. Just define a host pattern to be matched. They can also have variables:

r := mux.NewRouter()
// Only matches if domain is "www.example.com".
r.Host("www.example.com")
// Matches a dynamic subdomain.
r.Host("{subdomain:[a-z]+}.example.com")

There are several other matchers that can be added. To match path prefixes:

r.PathPrefix("/products/")

...or HTTP methods:

r.Methods("GET", "POST")

...or URL schemes:

r.Schemes("https")

...or header values:

r.Headers("X-Requested-With", "XMLHttpRequest")

...or query values:

r.Queries("key", "value")

...or to use a custom matcher function:

r.MatcherFunc(func(r *http.Request, rm *RouteMatch) bool {
    return r.ProtoMajor == 0
})

...and finally, it is possible to combine several matchers in a single route:

r.HandleFunc("/products", ProductsHandler).
  Host("www.example.com").
  Methods("GET").
  Schemes("http")

Routes are tested in the order they were added to the router. If two routes match, the first one wins:

r := mux.NewRouter()
r.HandleFunc("/specific", specificHandler)
r.PathPrefix("/").Handler(catchAllHandler)

Setting the same matching conditions again and again can be boring, so we have a way to group several routes that share the same requirements. We call it "subrouting".

For example, let's say we have several URLs that should only match when the host is www.example.com. Create a route for that host and get a "subrouter" from it:

r := mux.NewRouter()
s := r.Host("www.example.com").Subrouter()

Then register routes in the subrouter:

s.HandleFunc("/products/", ProductsHandler)
s.HandleFunc("/products/{key}", ProductHandler)
s.HandleFunc("/articles/{category}/{id:[0-9]+}", ArticleHandler)

The three URL paths we registered above will only be tested if the domain is www.example.com, because the subrouter is tested first. This is not only convenient, but also optimizes request matching. You can create subrouters combining any attribute matchers accepted by a route.

Subrouters can be used to create domain or path "namespaces": you define subrouters in a central place and then parts of the app can register its paths relatively to a given subrouter.

There's one more thing about subroutes. When a subrouter has a path prefix, the inner routes use it as base for their paths:

r := mux.NewRouter()
s := r.PathPrefix("/products").Subrouter()
// "/products/"
s.HandleFunc("/", ProductsHandler)
// "/products/{key}/"
s.HandleFunc("/{key}/", ProductHandler)
// "/products/{key}/details"
s.HandleFunc("/{key}/details", ProductDetailsHandler)

Static Files

Note that the path provided to PathPrefix() represents a "wildcard": calling PathPrefix("/static/").Handler(...) means that the handler will be passed any request that matches "/static/*". This makes it easy to serve static files with mux:

…

Serving Single Page Applications

Most of the time it makes sense to serve your SPA on a separate web server from your API, but sometimes it's desirable to serve them both from one place. It's possible to write a simple handler for serving your SPA (for use with React Router's BrowserRouter for example), and leverage mux's powerful routing for your API endpoints.

…

Registered URLs

Now let's see how to build registered URLs.

Routes can be named. All routes that define a name can have their URLs built, or "reversed". We define a name calling Name() on a route. For example:

r := mux.NewRouter()
r.HandleFunc("/articles/{category}/{id:[0-9]+}", ArticleHandler).
  Name("article")

To build a URL, get the route and call the URL() method, passing a sequence of key/value pairs for the route variables. For the previous route, we would do:

url, err := r.Get("article").URL("category", "technology", "id", "42")

...and the result will be a url.URL with the following path:

"/articles/technology/42"

This also works for host and query value variables:

r := mux.NewRouter()
r.Host("{subdomain}.example.com").
  Path("/articles/{category}/{id:[0-9]+}").
  Queries("filter", "{filter}").
  HandlerFunc(ArticleHandler).
  Name("article")

// url.String() will be "http://news.example.com/articles/technology/42?filter=gorilla"
url, err := r.Get("article").URL("subdomain", "news",
                                 "category", "technology",
                                 "id", "42",
                                 "filter", "gorilla")

All variables defined in the route are required, and their values must conform to the corresponding patterns. These requirements guarantee that a generated URL will always match a registered route -- the only exception is for explicitly defined "build-only" routes which never match.

Regex support also exists for matching Headers within a route. For example, we could do:

r.HeadersRegexp("Content-Type", "application/(text|json)")

...and the route will match both requests with a Content-Type of application/json as well as application/text

There's also a way to build only the URL host or path for a route: use the methods URLHost() or URLPath() instead. For the previous route, we would do:

// "http://news.example.com/"
host, err := r.Get("article").URLHost("subdomain", "news")

// "/articles/technology/42"
path, err := r.Get("article").URLPath("category", "technology", "id", "42")

And if you use subrouters, host and path defined separately can be built as well:

r := mux.NewRouter()
s := r.Host("{subdomain}.example.com").Subrouter()
s.Path("/articles/{category}/{id:[0-9]+}").
  HandlerFunc(ArticleHandler).
  Name("article")

// "http://news.example.com/articles/technology/42"
url, err := r.Get("article").URL("subdomain", "news",
                                 "category", "technology",
                                 "id", "42")

To find all the required variables for a given route when calling URL(), the method GetVarNames() is available:

r := mux.NewRouter()
r.Host("{domain}").
    Path("/{group}/{item_id}").
    Queries("some_data1", "{some_data1}").
    Queries("some_data2", "{some_data2}").
    Name("article")

// Will print [domain group item_id some_data1 some_data2] <nil>
fmt.Println(r.Get("article").GetVarNames())

Walking Routes

The Walk function on mux.Router can be used to visit all of the routes that are registered on a router. For example, the following prints all of the registered routes:

…

Graceful Shutdown

Go 1.8 introduced the ability to gracefully shutdown a *http.Server. Here's how to do that alongside mux:

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Middleware

Mux supports the addition of middlewares to a Router, which are executed in the order they are added if a match is found, including its subrouters. Middlewares are (typically) small pieces of code which take one request, do something with it, and pass it down to another middleware or the final handler. Some common use cases for middleware are request logging, header manipulation, or ResponseWriter hijacking.

Mux middlewares are defined using the de facto standard type:

type MiddlewareFunc func(http.Handler) http.Handler

Typically, the returned handler is a closure which does something with the http.ResponseWriter and http.Request passed to it, and then calls the handler passed as parameter to the MiddlewareFunc. This takes advantage of closures being able access variables from the context where they are created, while retaining the signature enforced by the receivers.

A very basic middleware which logs the URI of the request being handled could be written as:

func loggingMiddleware(next http.Handler) http.Handler {
    return http.HandlerFunc(func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
        // Do stuff here
        log.Println(r.RequestURI)
        // Call the next handler, which can be another middleware in the chain, or the final handler.
        next.ServeHTTP(w, r)
    })
}

Middlewares can be added to a router using Router.Use():

r := mux.NewRouter()
r.HandleFunc("/", handler)
r.Use(loggingMiddleware)

A more complex authentication middleware, which maps session token to users, could be written as:

…

r := mux.NewRouter()
r.HandleFunc("/", handler)

amw := authenticationMiddleware{tokenUsers: make(map[string]string)}
amw.Populate()

r.Use(amw.Middleware)

Note: The handler chain will be stopped if your middleware doesn't call next.ServeHTTP() with the corresponding parameters. This can be used to abort a request if the middleware writer wants to.