Create your first WebSocket service

Mihalis Tsoukalos explains how to use the Go programming language to work with the WebSocket protocol.

- Mihalis Tsoukalos

This tutorial covers the WebSocket protocol and how to work with it using the Go programming language. We’re going to develop a WebSocket client and a WebSocket server that can interact with each other. In the process, we are also going to learn the basics of Unix signal handling in Go and how to test a WebSocket server using the Websocat command line utility as well as JavaScript.

Go is an open source programming language and WebSocket is an open protocol. The same applies to HTML and JavaScript, as well as Linux. People make a living from open source projects, tools, technologies and ideas, so please recognise that and contribute in any way you can. Many thanks to all these people!

Gorilla sockets

To develop a small yet fully functional WebSocket server, we’re using the gorilla/websocket (https:// github.com/gorilla/websocket) module. The server implements the Echo service, which means that it automatically returns its input to the client. It also expects to get client input before sending data back.

Apart from gorilla/websocket, the golang.org/x/ net/websocket package offers another way of developing WebSocket clients and servers. However, according to its documentation, golang.org/x/net/ websocket lacks some features and it is advised that you use https://godoc.org/github.com/gorilla/ websocket, the one used here, or https://godoc.org/ nhooyr.io/websocket instead.