HTTP client

Making HTTP requests is a core part of many applications these days. Go, being a web-friendly language, contains several tools for making HTTP requests in the net/http package.

The basic HTTP request

This example uses the http.Get() function from the net/http standard library package. It will read the entire response body to a variable named body and then print it to standard output:

package main

import (
   "fmt"
   "io/ioutil"
   "log"
   "net/http"
)

func main() {
   // Make basic HTTP GET request
   response, err := http.Get("http://www.example.com")
   if err != nil {
      log.Fatal("Error fetching URL. ", err)
   }

   // Read body from response
   body, err := ioutil.ReadAll(response.Body)
   response.Body.Close()
   if err != nil {
      log.Fatal("Error reading response. ", err)
   }

   fmt.Printf("%s\n", body)
}

Using the client SSL certificate

If a remote HTTPS server has strict authentication and requires a trusted client certificate, you can specify the certificate...