websocket

Overview ¶

Package websocket implements the WebSocket protocol defined in RFC 6455.

Overview ¶

The Conn type represents a WebSocket connection. A server application calls the Upgrader.Upgrade method from an HTTP request handler to get a *Conn:

var upgrader = websocket.Upgrader{
    ReadBufferSize:  1024,
    WriteBufferSize: 1024,
}

func handler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    conn, err := upgrader.Upgrade(w, r, nil)
    if err != nil {
        log.Println(err)
        return
    }
    ... Use conn to send and receive messages.
}

Call the connection's WriteMessage and ReadMessage methods to send and receive messages as a slice of bytes. This snippet of code shows how to echo messages using these methods:

for {
    messageType, p, err := conn.ReadMessage()
    if err != nil {
        log.Println(err)
        return
    }
    if err := conn.WriteMessage(messageType, p); err != nil {
        log.Println(err)
        return
    }
}

In above snippet of code, p is a []byte and messageType is an int with value websocket.BinaryMessage or websocket.TextMessage.

An application can also send and receive messages using the io.WriteCloser and io.Reader interfaces. To send a message, call the connection NextWriter method to get an io.WriteCloser, write the message to the writer and close the writer when done. To receive a message, call the connection NextReader method to get an io.Reader and read until io.EOF is returned. This snippet shows how to echo messages using the NextWriter and NextReader methods:

for {
    messageType, r, err := conn.NextReader()
    if err != nil {
        return
    }
    w, err := conn.NextWriter(messageType)
    if err != nil {
        return err
    }
    if _, err := io.Copy(w, r); err != nil {
        return err
    }
    if err := w.Close(); err != nil {
        return err
    }
}

Data Messages ¶

The WebSocket protocol distinguishes between text and binary data messages. Text messages are interpreted as UTF-8 encoded text. The interpretation of binary messages is left to the application.

This package uses the TextMessage and BinaryMessage integer constants to identify the two data message types. The ReadMessage and NextReader methods return the type of the received message. The messageType argument to the WriteMessage and NextWriter methods specifies the type of a sent message.

It is the application's responsibility to ensure that text messages are valid UTF-8 encoded text.

Control Messages ¶

The WebSocket protocol defines three types of control messages: close, ping and pong. Call the connection WriteControl, WriteMessage or NextWriter methods to send a control message to the peer.

Connections handle received close messages by calling the handler function set with the SetCloseHandler method and by returning a *CloseError from the NextReader, ReadMessage or the message Read method. The default close handler sends a close message to the peer.

Connections handle received ping messages by calling the handler function set with the SetPingHandler method. The default ping handler sends a pong message to the peer.

Connections handle received pong messages by calling the handler function set with the SetPongHandler method. The default pong handler does nothing. If an application sends ping messages, then the application should set a pong handler to receive the corresponding pong.

The control message handler functions are called from the NextReader, ReadMessage and message reader Read methods. The default close and ping handlers can block these methods for a short time when the handler writes to the connection.

The application must read the connection to process close, ping and pong messages sent from the peer. If the application is not otherwise interested in messages from the peer, then the application should start a goroutine to read and discard messages from the peer. A simple example is:

func readLoop(c *websocket.Conn) {
    for {
        if _, _, err := c.NextReader(); err != nil {
            c.Close()
            break
        }
    }
}

Concurrency ¶

Connections support one concurrent reader and one concurrent writer.

Applications are responsible for ensuring that no more than one goroutine calls the write methods (NextWriter, SetWriteDeadline, WriteMessage, WriteJSON, EnableWriteCompression, SetCompressionLevel) concurrently and that no more than one goroutine calls the read methods (NextReader, SetReadDeadline, ReadMessage, ReadJSON, SetPongHandler, SetPingHandler) concurrently.

The Close and WriteControl methods can be called concurrently with all other methods.

Origin Considerations ¶

Web browsers allow Javascript applications to open a WebSocket connection to any host. It's up to the server to enforce an origin policy using the Origin request header sent by the browser.

The Upgrader calls the function specified in the CheckOrigin field to check the origin. If the CheckOrigin function returns false, then the Upgrade method fails the WebSocket handshake with HTTP status 403.

If the CheckOrigin field is nil, then the Upgrader uses a safe default: fail the handshake if the Origin request header is present and the Origin host is not equal to the Host request header.

The deprecated package-level Upgrade function does not perform origin checking. The application is responsible for checking the Origin header before calling the Upgrade function.

Buffers ¶

Connections buffer network input and output to reduce the number of system calls when reading or writing messages.

Write buffers are also used for constructing WebSocket frames. See RFC 6455, Section 5 for a discussion of message framing. A WebSocket frame header is written to the network each time a write buffer is flushed to the network. Decreasing the size of the write buffer can increase the amount of framing overhead on the connection.

The buffer sizes in bytes are specified by the ReadBufferSize and WriteBufferSize fields in the Dialer and Upgrader. The Dialer uses a default size of 4096 when a buffer size field is set to zero. The Upgrader reuses buffers created by the HTTP server when a buffer size field is set to zero. The HTTP server buffers have a size of 4096 at the time of this writing.

The buffer sizes do not limit the size of a message that can be read or written by a connection.

Buffers are held for the lifetime of the connection by default. If the Dialer or Upgrader WriteBufferPool field is set, then a connection holds the write buffer only when writing a message.

Applications should tune the buffer sizes to balance memory use and performance. Increasing the buffer size uses more memory, but can reduce the number of system calls to read or write the network. In the case of writing, increasing the buffer size can reduce the number of frame headers written to the network.

Some guidelines for setting buffer parameters are:

Limit the buffer sizes to the maximum expected message size. Buffers larger than the largest message do not provide any benefit.

Depending on the distribution of message sizes, setting the buffer size to a value less than the maximum expected message size can greatly reduce memory use with a small impact on performance. Here's an example: If 99% of the messages are smaller than 256 bytes and the maximum message size is 512 bytes, then a buffer size of 256 bytes will result in 1.01 more system calls than a buffer size of 512 bytes. The memory savings is 50%.

A write buffer pool is useful when the application has a modest number writes over a large number of connections. when buffers are pooled, a larger buffer size has a reduced impact on total memory use and has the benefit of reducing system calls and frame overhead.

Compression EXPERIMENTAL ¶

Per message compression extensions (RFC 7692) are experimentally supported by this package in a limited capacity. Setting the EnableCompression option to true in Dialer or Upgrader will attempt to negotiate per message deflate support.

var upgrader = websocket.Upgrader{
    EnableCompression: true,
}

If compression was successfully negotiated with the connection's peer, any message received in compressed form will be automatically decompressed. All Read methods will return uncompressed bytes.

Per message compression of messages written to a connection can be enabled or disabled by calling the corresponding Conn method:

conn.EnableWriteCompression(false)

Currently this package does not support compression with "context takeover". This means that messages must be compressed and decompressed in isolation, without retaining sliding window or dictionary state across messages. For more details refer to RFC 7692.

Use of compression is experimental and may result in decreased performance.