artyom / assetfs

Command to generate http.FileSystem implementation compiling assets into Go binary

Command assetfs generates http.FileSystem implementation compiling assets inside go binary as byte slices. Generated file exposes function AssetDir() which usage is similar to http.Dir() usage.

assetfs can generate 2 files: one for production usage, where assets should be compiled inside binary, and one for development usage, where AssetDir() is aliases to http.Dir() and files are served from disk. As both files exposes function with the same name, they're differentiated with build tags.

Usage: assetfs [flags] assetsDir ...
  -dev string
	path to write development stub
  -devtag string
	build tag to assign to development stub (default "dev")
  -name string
	package name
  -out string
	path to write generated content
  -tag string
	build tag to use for main generated file

This program is mainly intended to be used with go generate as follows:

Consider your repository has static subdirectory which is normally exposed as http.Dir("static"). Create file static.go with the following content:

package mypackage
//go:generate assetfs static

Once you run go generate, it will produce two extra files: static_assetfs.go and static_assetfs-dev.go. Both expose AssetDir() function, the latter has this function aliased to http.Dir() and has dev build tag set, so it can be used during development when you expect to see changes in static files as you refresh page. Next thing to do would be to replace usage of http.Dir("static") with AssetDir("static") in your code.

assetfs main intention is to include small static assets inside compiled Go binary, so that resulting program has less file dependencies. As all included files are stored as byte slices, they affect both binary size and runtime memory consumption, so you should avoid including large files. Currently the only artificial limit built in is for a single file size (10 MiB).