boxedRice

Fork

This is a heavily modified fork of the go.rice tool by GeertJohan. We found the rice tool's use of go source parsing excessive for our needs so we developed a smaller and simpler version that would be easy to maintain and still use the useful features go.rice provided. This version simply creates a tool that will import the paths listed as 'boxes' and append them to the executable.

boxedRice

boxedRice is a Go package that makes working with resources such as html,js,css,images and templates very easy. During development boxedRice will load required files directly from disk. Upon deployment it is easy to add all resource files to a executable using the boxedRice tool, without changing the source code for your package. boxedRice provides several methods to add resources to a binary.

What does it do?

The first thing boxedRice does is finding the correct absolute path for your resource files. Say you are executing go binary in your home directory, but your html-files are located in $GOPATH/src/yourApplication/html-files. boxedRice will lookup the correct path for that directory (relative to the location of yourApplication). The only thing you have to do is include the resources using boxedRice.FindBox("html-files").

This only works when the source is available to the machine executing the binary. Which is always the case when the binary was installed with go get or go install. It might occur that you wish to simply provide a binary, without source. The boxedRice tool provides the append command to append items to the binary as a zip. boxedRice will detect the appended resources and load those, instead of looking up files from disk.

Installation

Use go get to install the package the boxedRice tool.

go get github.com/bypasslane/boxedRice
go get github.com/bypasslane/boxedRice/boxedRice

Package usage

Import the package: import "github.com/bypasslane/boxedRice"

Serving a static content folder over HTTP with a boxedRice Box

http.Handle("/", http.FileServer(boxedRice.MustFindBox("http-files").HTTPBox()))
http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)

Service a static content folder over HTTP at a non-root location

box := boxedRice.MustFindBox("cssfiles")
cssFileServer := http.StripPrefix("/css/", http.FileServer(box.HTTPBox()))
http.Handle("/css/", cssFileServer)
http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)

Note the trailing slash in /css/ in both the call to http.StripPrefix and http.Handle.

Loading a template

// find a boxedRice.Box
templateBox, err := boxedRice.FindBox("example-templates")
if err != nil {
	log.Fatal(err)
}
// get file contents as string
templateString, err := templateBox.String("message.tmpl")
if err != nil {
	log.Fatal(err)
}
// parse and execute the template
tmplMessage, err := template.New("message").Parse(templateString)
if err != nil {
	log.Fatal(err)
}
tmplMessage.Execute(os.Stdout, map[string]string{"Message": "Hello, world!"})

Never call FindBox() or MustFindBox() from an init() function, as the boxes might have not been loaded at that time.

Tool usage

The boxedRice tool lets you add the resources to a binary executable so the files are not loaded from the filesystem anymore. This creates a 'standalone' executable.

append

Append resources to executable as zip file

This method changes an already built executable. It appends the resources as zip file to the binary. It makes compilation a lot faster and can be used with large resource files.

Downsides for appending are that it requires zip to be installed and does not provide a working Seek method.

Run the following commands to create a standalone executable.

go build -o example
boxedRice append -b example/example-files --exec example

Note: requires zip command to be installed

On windows, install zip from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/zip.htm or cygwin/msys toolsets.

Help information

Run boxedRice -h for information about all options.

You can run the -h option for each sub-command, e.g. boxedRice append -h.

Order of precedence

When opening a new box, the boxedRice package tries to locate the resources in the following order:

• appended as zip
• 'live' from filesystem

License

This project is licensed under a Simplified BSD license. Please read the LICENSE file.

TODO & Development

This package is not completed yet. Though it already provides working appending, there are some refinements to be made. These are noted in code as TODO comments.

Package documentation

You will find package documentation at godoc.org/github.com/bypasslane/boxedRice.