Golang Web: POST Method

Mar 10, 2024

Introduction

In this section of the series, we will be exploring how to send a POST HTTP request in golang. We will understand how to send a basic POST request, create an HTTP request, and parse json, structs into the request body, add headers, etc in the following sections of this post. We will understand how to marshal the golang struct/types into JSON format, send files in the request, and handle form data with examples of each in this article. Let’s answer a few questions first.

What is a POST request?

POST method is a type of request that is used to send data to a server(a machine on the internet).

Imagine you are placing an order at a restaurant. With a GET request, it would be like asking the waiter, “What kind of pizza do you have?” The waiter would respond by telling you the menu options (the information retrieved from the server).

However, a POST request is more like giving your completed order to the waiter. You tell them the specific pizza you want, its size, and any additional toppings (the data you send). The waiter then takes this information (POST request) back to the kitchen (the server) to process it (fulfill your order).

In the world of web development, POST requests are often used for things like:

Submitting forms (e.g., contact forms, login forms) Uploading files (e.g., photos, videos) Creating new accounts Sending data to be processed (e.g., online purchases)

Here’s an example of what the POST request might look like in this scenario:

POST /api/order HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Content-Type: application/json
Content-Length: 123

{
    "userID": 123,
    "orderID": 456,
    "items": [
        {
            "itemID": 789,
            "name": "Pizza",
            "quantity": 2
        },
        {
            "itemID": 999,
            "name": "Burger",
            "quantity": 1
        }
    ]
}

In this example:

The POST method is used to send data to the server.
The /api/order is the endpoint of the server.
The application/json is the content type of the request.
The 123 is the content length of the request.
The {"userID": 123, "orderID": 456, "items": [{"itemID": 789, "name": "Pizza", "quantity": 2}, {"itemID": 999, "name": "Burger", "quantity": 1}]} is the body of the request.

Why the need for a POST request?

In the world of HTTP requests, we use the POST method to securely send data from a client (like a user’s browser) to a server. This is crucial because the GET method, while convenient for retrieving data, has limitations:

Imagine you are in registering for an event via Google form, you type in your details on the webpage like name, email, address, phone number, and other personal details. If the website/app was using the GET method to send the request to register or do any other authentication/privacy-related requests, it could expose the data in the URL itself. It would be something along the lines https://form.google.com/register/<form-name>-<id>/?name=John&phone_number=1234567890, if a user maliciously sniffs into your network and inspects the URL, your data will be exposed. That is the reason we need POST a method.

How a POST method works?

A POST request is used to send data to a server to create or update(there is a separate method for updating) a resource. The client(browser/other APIs) sends a POST request to the server’s API endpoint with the data in the request body. This data can be in formats like JSON, XML, or form data. The server processes the POST request, validates and parses the data in the request body, makes any changes or creates resources based on that data, and returns a response. The response would contain a status code indicating the success or failure of the operation and may contain the newly created or updated resource in the response body. The client must check the response status code to verify the outcome and process the response accordingly. Unlike GET, POST can create new resources on the server. The body of a POST contains the data for creation while the URL identifies the resource to be created. Overall, POST transfers data to the server for processing, creation or updating of resources.

The status code is usually 201 indicating the resource is successfully created or 200 for just indicating success.

Some common steps for creating and sending a POST request as a developer include:

Defining the API endpoint
Clarifying the data format (json, language native objects, xml , text, form-data, etc)
Converting / Marshalling the data
Attaching header for Content-Type as key and value as the format of the data type (e.g. application/json for json)
Sending the request

The above steps are general for creating and sending a POST request, they are not specific to Golang. For golang specific steps, we need to dive a bit deeper, let’s get started.

Basic POST method in Golang

To send a POST request in golang, we need to use the http package. The http package has the Post method, which takes in 3 parameters, namely the URL, the Content-Type, and the Body. The body can be nil if the URL endpoint doesn’t necessarily require a body. The Content-Type is the string, since we are just touching on how the Post request is constructed, we will see what the Content-Type string value should be in the later sections.

http.Post(URL, Content-Type, Body)

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"net/http"
)

func main() {
	apiURL := "https://reqres.in/api/users"

	// POST request
	resp, err := http.Post(apiURL, "", nil)
    // ideally the Content-Type header should be set to the relevant format
	// resp, err := http.Post(apiURL, "application/json", nil)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	fmt.Println(resp.StatusCode)
    fmt.Println(resp)
	defer resp.Body.Close()
}


$ go run main.go

201
&{
    201 Created
    201
    HTTP/2.0
    2
    0
    map[
        Access-Control-Allow-Origin:[*]
        Cf-Cache-Status:[DYNAMIC]
        Cf-Ray:[861cd9aec8223e4b-BOM]
        Content-Length:[50]
        Content-Type:[application/json; charset=utf-8]
        Date:[Sat, 09 Mar 2024 17:40:28 GMT]
        Server:[cloudflare]
        ...
        ...
        ...
        X-Powered-By:[Express]
    ]
    {0xc00017c180}
    50
    []
    false
    false
    map[]
    0xc000156000
    0xc00012a420
}

The above code is sending the POST request to the https://reqres.in/api/users endpoint with an empty body and no specific format for Content-Type header. The response is according to the Response structure. We can see we got 201 status, which indicates the server received the POST request successfully, the API is a dummy api, so we don’t care about the data we are processing, we are just using the API as a placeholder for sending the POST request.

We can use map[string]interface{} it to pass the data in the request body. The json.Marshal method is used to convert the map into JSON format. We will look into the details shortly in the next few examples.

package main

import (
	"bytes"
	"encoding/json"
	"fmt"
	"net/http"
)

func main() {
    apiURL := "https://reqres.in/api/users"
    bodyMap := map[string]interface{}{
        "name": "morpheus",
        "job": "leader",
    }

    requestBody, err := json.Marshal(bodyMap)
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }
    body := bytes.NewBuffer(requestBody)

    resp, err := http.Post(apiURL, "application/json", body)
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }
    fmt.Println(resp.StatusCode)
    defer resp.Body.Close()
}

$ go run main.go

201

The above code sends the POST request to the https://reqres.in/api/users endpoint with the data in the request body in JSON format.

Creating a POST request in Golang

We can construct the POST request with the NewRequest method. The method takes in 3 parameters, namely the method (e.g. POST, GET), the URL and the body (if there is any). We can then add extra information to the headers or the Request object after constructing the basic HTTP Request object.

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"net/http"
)

func main() {
	apiURL := "https://reqres.in/api/users"

	req, err := http.NewRequest(http.MethodPost, apiURL, nil)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	resp, err := http.DefaultClient.Do(req)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	fmt.Println(resp.StatusCode)
	//fmt.Println(resp)
	defer resp.Body.Close()
}

$ go run main.go

201

In the above example, we have created an HTTP Request as the POST method, with https://reqres.in/api/users as the URL, and no body. This constructs an HTTP Request object, which can be sent as the parameter to the http.DefaultClient.Do method, which is the default client for the request we sent in the earlier examples as http.Get or http.Post methods. We can implement a custom client as well, and then apply Do the method with the request parameters. The Do method returns the Request object or the error if any.

More on the customizing Client will be explained in a separate post in the series.

The response is also in the same format as the Response structure that we have seen earlier. This section of the series aims to construct a post request, and not to parse the response, we have already understood the parsing of the response in the Get method section of the series.

Parsing objects to JSON for POST method request

We might have a golang object that we want to send as a body to an API in the POST request, for that we need to convert the golang struct object to JSON. We can do this by using the Marshal or the Encode method for serialization of the golang struct object to JSON.

Using Marshal method

Marshaling is the process of converting data from a data structure into a format suitable for transmission over a network or for storage. It’s commonly used to convert native objects in a programming language into a serialized format, typically a byte stream, that can be transmitted or stored efficiently. You might get a question here, what is the difference between Marshalling and Serialization? Well, Serialization, is a broader term that encompasses marshalling. It refers to the process of converting an object or data structure into a format that can be stored or transmitted and later reconstructed into the original object. Serialization may involve converting data into byte streams, XML, JSON, or other formats. So, in summary, marshaling specifically deals with converting native objects into a format suitable for transmission, while serialization encompasses the broader process of preparing data for storage or transmission.

The json package has the Marshal method that converts the golang object into JSON. The Marshal method takes in a parameter as the struct object with type any and returns a byte slice []byte and error (if any).

package main

import (
	"bytes"
	"encoding/json"
	"fmt"
	"net/http"
)

type User struct {
	Name   string `json:"name"`
	Salary int    `json:"salary"`
	Age    int    `json:"age"`
}

func main() {
	user := User{
		Name:   "Alice",
		Salary: 50000,
		Age:    25,
	}
	apiURL := "https://dummy.restapiexample.com/api/v1/create"

	// marshalling process
	// converting Go specific data structure/types to JSON
	bodyBytes, err := json.Marshal(user)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	fmt.Println(string(bodyBytes))

	// reading json into a buffer/in-memory
	body := bytes.NewBuffer(bodyBytes)

	// post request
	resp, err := http.Post(apiURL, "application/json", body)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	fmt.Println(resp.StatusCode)
	defer resp.Body.Close()
}

$ go run main.go

{"name":"Alice","salary":50000,"age":25}
200

In the above example, we have created a struct User with fields Name, Salary, and Age, the json tags will help label each key in JSON with the tag for the respective fields in the struct. We create an object user of a type User with the values as Alice, 50000, and 25 respectively.

We call the json.Marshal method with the parameter user that represents the struct object User, the method returns a slice of bytes, or an error either or both could be nil. If we try to see the stringified representation of the byte slice, we can see something like {"name":"Alice","salary":50000,"age":25} which is a JSON string for the user struct. We can’t parse the byte slice as the body in the POST request, we need the io.Reader object, so we can load the byte slice bodyBytes into a buffer and parse that as a body for the POST request.

We then send a POST request to the endpoint https://dummy.restapiexample.com/api/v1/create with the content type as application/json and with the body as body which was a io.Reader object as an in-memory buffer.

In brief, we can summarize the marshaling of the golang object into JSON with Marshal function as the following steps:

Defining the structure as per the request body
Creating the struct object for parsing the data as body to the request
Calling the json.Marshal function to convert the object to JSON (parameter as the struct object any type)
Loading the byte slice into a buffer with bytes.NewBuffer()
Sending the POST request to the endpoint with the body as the io.Reader object and content type as application/json

Using Encode method

We can even use the Encoder.Encode method to parse the golang struct object to JSON. Firstly, we should have the struct defined as per the request body that the particular API takes, we can make use of the json tags, omitempty, omit(-) options to make the marshaling process work accordingly. We can then create the object of that particular struct with the data we require to be created as a resource with the POST request on that API service.

Thereafter we can create an empty buffer object with bytes.Buffer, this buffer object would be used to initialize the Encoder object with the NewEncoder method. This would give access to the Encode method, which is used to take in the struct object (any type) and this will populate the buffer we initialized with the NewEncoder method.

Later we can access that buffer to parse it to the Post request as the body. Let’s understand it better with an example.

package main

import (
	"bytes"
	"encoding/json"
	"fmt"
	"net/http"
)

type User struct {
	Name   string
	Salary int
	Age    int
}

func main() {
	user := User{
		Name:   "Alice",
		Salary: 50000,
		Age:    25,
	}
	apiURL := "https://dummy.restapiexample.com/api/v1/create"

	var bodyBuffer bytes.Buffer
	var encoder = json.NewEncoder(&bodyBuffer)
	err := encoder.Encode(user)
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }

	resp, err := http.Post(apiURL, "application/json", &bodyBuffer)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	fmt.Println(resp.StatusCode)
	fmt.Println(resp)
	defer resp.Body.Close()
}

Over here, we have created a struct User with fields Name, Salary, and Age, we initialize the user as the object of the User struct. Then we create a buffer bodyBuffer of type bytes.Buffer this is the actual buffer that we will send as the body. Further, we initialize the Encoder object as encoder with the json.NewEncoder method by parsing the reference of bodyBuffer as the parameter. Since bytes.Buffer implements the io.Writer interface, we can pass the bodyBuffer to the NewEncoder method. This will create the Encoder object which in turn will give us access to the Encode method, where we will parse the struct instance and it will populate the buffer with which we initialized the Encoder object earlier.

Now, we have the encode object, this gives us the access to Encode method, we call the Encode method with the parameter of user which is a User struct instance/object. The Encode method will populate the bodyBuffer object or it will result in an error if anything goes wrong (the data is incorrectly parsed or is not in the required format).

We can call the Post method with the initialized URL, the Content-Type as application/json since we have converted the struct instance to JSON object, and the body as the reference to the buffer as &bodyBuffer

So, the steps for parsing struct instances into JSON objects with the Encoder.Encode method is as follows:

Defining the structure as per the request body
Creating the struct object for parsing the data as body to the request
Creating an empty bytes.Buffer object as an in-memory buffer
Initializing the Encoder object with NewEncoder method by parsing the reference of bodyBuffer as the parameter
Calling the Encode method with the parameter of struct instance/object
Sending the POST request to the endpoint with the content type as application/json and body as the reference to the buffer

The results are the same as the above example just the way we have parsed the struct instance to JSON object is different.

Parsing JSON to POST request

We have seen how we can parse golang struct instances to JSON and then send the post request, but what if we had the JSON string already with us, and we want to send the request? Well, that’s much easier, right? We already have parsed the JSON string to the Post request by loading the slice of bytes into a buffer, so we just need to convert the string to a slice of bytes which is quite an easy task, and then load that byte slice to the buffer.

package main

import (
	"bytes"
	"fmt"
	"net/http"
)

func main() {
	// dummy api
	apiURL := "https://dummy.restapiexample.com/api/v1/create"

	// json data
	data := `{
        "name": "Alice",
        "job": "Teacher"
    }`
	body := bytes.NewBuffer([]byte(data))

	// POST request
	resp, err := http.Post(apiURL, "application/json", body)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	fmt.Println(resp.StatusCode)
	fmt.Println(resp)
	defer resp.Body.Close()
}

In the example above, we already have a JSON string data with keys as name and job but it is not JSON, it is a stringified JSON. We can convert the stringified JSON to a slice of bytes using the []byte function. Further, we have used the bytes.NewBuffer method to load the byte slice into an io.Reader object. This object returned by the bytes.NewBuffer will serve as the body for the POST request.

Parsing JSON to objects in Golang from POST method response

package main

import (
	"bytes"
	"encoding/json"
	"fmt"
	"io"
	"net/http"
)

type User struct {
	Name   string `json:"name"`
	Salary int    `json:"salary"`
	Age    string `json:"age"`
	ID     int    `json:"id,omitempty"`
}

type UserResponse struct {
	Status string `json:"status"`
	Data   User   `json:"data"`
}

func main() {
	user := User{
		Name:   "Alice",
		Salary: 50000,
		Age:    "25",
	}
	apiURL := "https://dummy.restapiexample.com/api/v1/create"

	// marshalling process
	// converting Go specific data structure/types to JSON
	bodyBytes, err := json.Marshal(user)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	fmt.Println(string(bodyBytes))

	// reading json into a buffer/in-memory
	body := bytes.NewBuffer(bodyBytes)

	// post request
	resp, err := http.Post(apiURL, "application/json", body)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	fmt.Println(resp.StatusCode)
	fmt.Println(resp)
	defer resp.Body.Close()

	// Read response body
	respBody, err := io.ReadAll(resp.Body)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}

	// unmarshalling process
	// converting JSON to Go specific data structure/types
	var userResponse UserResponse
	if err := json.Unmarshal(respBody, &userResponse); err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	fmt.Println(userResponse)
	fmt.Println(userResponse.Data)
}


{success {Alice 50000 25 3239}}
{Alice 50000 25 577}

The above example is a POST request with a struct instance being loaded as a JSON string and then sent as a buffer to the API endpoint, it also reads the response body with a specific structure UserResponse and unmarshalled the resp.Body from the io.Reader as respBody and then loads into userResponse object. This example gives an entire process of what we have understood in the JSON data parsing for a POST request.

Sending Form data in a POST request

We can also send data to a POST request in the form of a form, the form which we use in the HTML. Golang has a net/url package to parse the form data. The form data is sent in the application/x-www-form-urlencoded format.

package main

import (
	"encoding/json"
	"fmt"
	"io"
	"net/http"
	"net/url"
	"strings"
)

type ResponseLogin struct {
	Token string `json:"token"`
}

func main() {
	// dummy api
	apiURL := "https://reqres.in/api/login"

	// Define form data
	formData := url.Values{}
	formData.Set("email", "eve.holt@reqres.in")
	formData.Set("password", "cityslicka")

	// Encode the form data
	fmt.Println(formData.Encode())
	reqBody := strings.NewReader(formData.Encode())
	fmt.Println(reqBody)

	// Make a POST request with form data
	resp, err := http.Post(apiURL, "application/x-www-form-urlencoded", reqBody)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	defer resp.Body.Close()

	// Print response status code
	fmt.Println("Status Code:", resp.StatusCode)

	// Read response body
	respBody, err := io.ReadAll(resp.Body)
    if err != nil {
        panic(err)
    }
	token := ResponseLogin{}

	json.Unmarshal(respBody, &token)
	fmt.Println(token)
}

$ go run main.go

email=eve.holt%40reqres.in&password=cityslicka
&{email=eve.holt%40reqres.in&password=cityslicka 0 -1}
Status Code: 200
{QpwL5tke4Pnpja7X4}

In the above example, we set a formData with the values of email and password which are url.Values object. The url.Values the object is used to store the key-value pairs of the form data. The formData is encoded with the url.Encode method, We load the encoded string to a buffer with strings.NewReader which implements the io.Reader interface, so that way we can pass that object as the body to the post request.

We send the POST request to the endpoint https://reqres.in/api/login with the content type as application/x-www-form-urlencoded and with the body as reqBody which implements the io.Reader interface as an in-memory buffer. The response from the request is read into the buffer with io.ReadAll method and we can Unmarshal the stream of bytes as a buffer into the ResponseLogin struct object.

The output shows the formData as encoded string email=eve.holt%40reqres.in&password=cityslicka as @ is encoded to %40, then we wrap the formData in a strings.NewReader object which is a buffer that implements io.Reader interface, hence we can see the result as the object. The status code for the request is 200 indicating the server received the form-data in the body and upon unmarshalling, we get the token as a response to the POST request which was a dummy login API.

This way we have parsed the form-data to the body of a POST request.

Sending File in a POST request

We have covered, parsing text, JSON, and form data, and now we need to move into sending files in a POST request. We can use the multipart package to parse files into the request body and set appropriate headers for reading the file from the API services.

We first read the file contents os.Open which returns a reference to the file object or an error. We create an empty bytes.Buffer object as body which will be populated later. The multipart.NewWriter method takes in the io.Writer object which will be the body as it is an bytes.Buffer object that implements the io.Writer interface. This will initialize the Writer object in the multipart package.

We create a form-field in the Writer object with the CreateFormFile method, which takes in the fieldName as the name of the field, and the fileName as the name of the file which will be read later in the multipart form. The method returns either the part or the error. The part is an object that implements the io.Writer interface.

Since we have stored the file contents in the file object, we copy the contents into the form-field with the Copy method. Since the part return from the CreateFormFile was implementing the io.Writer interface, we can use it to Copy the contents from source to destination. The source is the io.Reader object and the destination is the io.Writer object, the destination for the Copy method is the first parameter, the source is the second parameter.

This Copy method will populate the buffer initialized earlier in the NewWriter method. This will give us a buffer that has the file contents in it. We can pass this buffer to the POST request with the body parameter. We also need to make sure we close the Writer object after copying the contents of the file. We can extract the type of file which will serve as the Content-Type of the request.

Let’s clear the explanation with an example.

package main

import (
	"bytes"
	"encoding/json"
	"fmt"
	"io"
	"mime/multipart"
	"net/http"
	"os"
)

type ResponseFile struct {
	Files map[string]string `json:"files"`
}

func main() {
	apiURL := "http://postman-echo.com/post"
	fileName := "sample.csv"

	file, err := os.Open(fileName)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	defer file.Close()

	body := &bytes.Buffer{}
	writer := multipart.NewWriter(body)

	part, err := writer.CreateFormFile("csvFile", fileName)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	_, err = io.Copy(part, file)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}

    contentType := writer.FormDataContentType()
    fmt.Println(contentType)

	writer.Close()

	resp, err := http.Post(apiURL, contentType, body)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	defer resp.Body.Close()

	fmt.Println("Status Code:", resp.StatusCode)

	respBody, err := io.ReadAll(resp.Body)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	token := ResponseFile{}
	json.Unmarshal(respBody, &token)
	fmt.Println(token)
	fmt.Println(token.Files[fileName])
}

multipart/form-data; boundary=7e0eacfff890be395eba19c70415c908124b503a56f23ebeec0ab3c665ca


--619671ea2c0aa47ca6664a7cda422169d73f3b8a089c659203f5413d03de
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="csvFile"; filename="sample.csv"
Content-Type: application/octet-stream

User,City,Age,Country
Alex Smith,Los Angeles,20,USA
John Doe,New York,30,USA
Jane Smith,Paris,25,France
Bob Johnson,London,40,UK

--619671ea2c0aa47ca6664a7cda422169d73f3b8a089c659203f5413d03de--



Status Code: 200

{map[sample.csv:data:application/octet-stream;base64,VXNlcixDaXR5LEFnZSxDb3VudHJ5CkFsZXggU21pdGgsTG9zIEFuZ2VsZXMsMjAsVVNBCkpvaG4gRG9lLE5ldyBZb3JrLDMwLFVTQQpKYW5lIFNtaXRoLFBhmlzLDI1LEZyYW5jZQpCb2IgSm9obnNvbixMb25kb24sNDAsVUsK]}

data:application/octet-stream;base64,VXNlcixDaXR5LEFnZSxDb3VudHJ5CkFsZXggU21pdGgsTG9zIEFuZ2VsZXMsMjAsVVNBCkpvaG4gRG9lLE5ldyBZb3JrLDMwLFVTQQpKYW5lIFNtaXRoLFBhmlzLDI1LEZyYW5jZQpCb2IgSm9obnNvbixMb25kb24sNDAsVUsK

In the above example, we first read the file sample.csv into the file object with os.Open method, this will return a reference to the file object or return an error if any arises while opening the file.

Then we create an empty buffer bytes.Buffer object which will serve as the body of the post request later as it will get populated with the file contents in the form of multipart/form-data.

We initialize the Writer object with multipart.NewWriter method which takes in the empty buffer as the parameter, we parse the body as the parameter. The method will return a reference to the multipart.Writer object.

With the Writer object we access the CreateFormFile method which takes in the fieldName as the name of the field, and the fileName as the name of the file. The method will return either the part or an error. The part in this case, is the reference to the io.Writer object that will be used to write the contents from the uploaded file.

Then, we can use the io.Copy method to copy the contents from the io.Reader object to the io.Writer object. The source is the io.Reader object and the destination is the io.Writer object. The first parameter is however the destination and the second parameter is the source. In the example, we call io.Copy(part, file) which will copy the contents of file to the part buffer.

We get the Content-Type by calling the Writer.FormDataContentType method. This returns us multipart/form-data; boundary=7e0eacfff890be395eba19c70415c908124b503a56f23ebeec0ab3c665ca which will serve the Content-Type for the Post request.

We need to make sure we close the Writer object with the Close method.

We just print the body.String() to get a look at what the actual body looks like, we can see there is a form for the file as a form-data with keys like Content-Type, Content-Disposition, etc. The file has the Content-Type as application/octet-stream and the actual content is rendered in the output.

The dummy API responds with a 200 status code and also sends the JSON data with the name of the file as the key and the value as the base64 encoded value of the file contents. This indicates that we were able to upload the file to the server API using a POST request. Well done!

I have also included some more examples of POST requests with files here which extends the above example by taking the encoded values and decoding to get the actual contents of the file back.

Best Practices for POST method

Here are some of the best practices for the POST method which are followed to make sure you consume or create the POST request in the most secure, efficient, and graceful way.

Always Close the Response Body

Ensure that you close the response body after reading from it. Use defer response.Body.Close() to automatically close the body when the surrounding function returns. This is crucial for releasing associated resources like network connections or file descriptors. Failure to close the response body can lead to memory leaks, particularly with a large volume of requests. Properly closing the body prevents resource exhaustion and maintains efficient memory usage.

Client Customization

Utilize the Client struct to customize the HTTP client behavior. By using a custom client, you can set timeouts, headers, user agents, and other configurations without modifying the DefaultClient provided by the http package. This approach allows for flexibility and avoids repetitive adjustments to the client configuration for each request.

Set Content-Type Appropriately

Ensure that you set the Content-Type header according to the request payload. Correctly specifying the Content-Type is crucial for the server to interpret the request payload correctly. Failing to set the Content-Type header accurately may result in the server rejecting the request. Always verify and match the Content-Type header with the content being sent in the POST request to ensure smooth communication with the server.

Reference

Postman POST API (For POST request with file upload)
Golang net/http Package

Conclusion

That’s it from this post of the series, a post on the POST method in golang :)

We have covered topics like creating basic post requests, Marshalling golang types into JSON format, parsing form data, sending a POST request with files, and best practices for the POST method. Hope you found this article helpful. If you have any queries, questions, or feedback, please let me know in the comments or on my social handles.

Happy Coding :)