Server

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Congratulations! You made an HTTP request parser and, honestly, that's the hardest part of this course. But of course, we're not done yet. Now let's build the actual server interface that handles the requests and sends responses.

I Like Bun's Approach

In Bun (JavaScript, I know, sorry), they have a very simple server implementation that looks like this in code:

const server = Bun.serve({
    port: 8080,
    async fetch(req) {
      return new Response("Bun!");
    }
}

It's fairly similar to Go's http.ListenAndServe:

server := &http.Server{
    Addr: ":8080",
    Handler: http.HandlerFunc(func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
        fmt.Fprintf(w, "Go!")
    }),
}
server.ListenAndServe()

We're going to follow a similar pattern, with a few differences that I'll point out as we get to them.

Assignment

In this step we'll be upgrading from a tcplistener to an actual httpserver! It will accept valid requests and send valid responses. That said, for now, no matter what request is sent, the response will always be the same.

Create a new main.go file in a new cmd/httpserver directory.
Create a new server package in your internal directory. This is where our version of Go's http.Server or Bun's serve will live.
Copy/paste the following code into your cmd/httpserver/main.go file:

const port = 42069

func main() {
	server, err := server.Serve(port)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("Error starting server: %v", err)
	}
	defer server.Close()
	log.Println("Server started on port", port)

	sigChan := make(chan os.Signal, 1)
	signal.Notify(sigChan, syscall.SIGINT, syscall.SIGTERM)
	<-sigChan
	log.Println("Server gracefully stopped")
}

As you can see, we've settled on a server.Serve function. This is where all the magic happens. It accepts a port and starts handling requests that come in. In a future step we'll allow it to accept a handler function, but for now, we're going to hardcode the response.

Notice the sigChan code. This is a common pattern in Go for gracefully shutting down a server. Because server.Serve returns immediately (it handles requests in the background in goroutines) if we exit main immediately, the server will just stop. We want to wait for a signal (like CTRL+C) before we stop the server.

In your new server package, implement the following methods and types (I won't hold your hand too much here):
- type Server struct - Contains the state of the server
- func Serve(port int) (*Server, error) - Creates a net.Listener and returns a new Server instance. Starts listening for requests inside a goroutine.
- func (s *Server) Close() error - Closes the listener and the server
- func (s *Server) listen() - Uses a loop to .Accept new connections as they come in, and handles each one in a new goroutine. I used an atomic.Bool to track whether the server is closed or not so that I can ignore connection errors after the server is closed.
- func (s *Server) handle(conn net.Conn) - Handles a single connection by writing the following response and then closing the connection:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Length: 13

Hello World!

Run and submit the CLI tests with your server running.