What’s an Embedded Resource?

An embedded resource in a application is a file that is included as part of the application. The file is not compiled, but is accessable from the code at run-time. Embedded resources can be any file type.

Languages as JAVA and C# support resources out of box. However, this is not the case for Golang. In order to emebed resource, we need to develop our own solution. Thankfully, there are couple of tools that are doing this for us.

Bindata

This package converts any file into embedding binary data for a go program. The file data is optionally gzip compressed before being converted to a raw byte slice.

It provides a command line tool go-bindata that offers a set of command line options, used to customize the output being generated:

  • ignore value Regex pattern to ignore
  • mode uint Optional file mode override for all files.
  • modtime int Optional modification unix timestamp override for all files.
  • nocompress Assets will not be GZIP compressed when this flag is specified.
  • nomemcopy Use a .rodata hack to get rid of unnecessary memcopies. Refer to the documentation to see what implications this carries.
  • nometadata Assets will not preserve size, mode, and modtime info.
  • o string Optional name of the output file to be generated. (default “./bindata.go”)
  • pkg string Package name to use in the generated code. (default “main”)
  • prefix string Optional path prefix to strip off asset names.
  • tags string Optional set of build tags to include.

Installation

To install the package and command line tool, use the following:

$ go get -u github.com/jteeuwen/go-bindata/...

Getting started

The simplest execution generates a bindata.go file in the current working directory. It includes all assets from the data directory:

$ go-bindata data/

The operation is done on one or more sets of files. All of them are embedded in a the Go source file, along with a table of contents and an Asset(string) ([]byte, error) function, which allows quick access to the assets. It should be used in the following way:

resource, err := Asset("path/to/the/resource/file.txt")
if err != nil {
    // Asset was not found.
}

Note that the generated code lives in the main package. However, this can be changed with pkg flag.

By default all embedded resources are compressed. If your resource is already optmized you can disable the compression by providing nocompress flag.

Another handy flag is debug argument, which causes the command line tool to not actually include the asset data as embedded resources. Instead of that it generates a Asset function implementation that loads the data from the original file on disk. This is very useful during development, when the assets are changed very often.

Go.rice

Go.rice takes similar to gobindata. It provides even more advanced features to handle your embeded resources. During the development phase it loads required assets directly from disk. Afterwards upon deployment the resource files could be included to a executable using the rice command line tool, without changing the source code for your package.

Installation

To install the package and the command line tool use go get:

$ go get github.com/GeertJohan/go.rice
$ go get github.com/GeertJohan/go.rice/rice

Getting started

Prior using rice you should import the package:

import "github.com/GeertJohan/go.rice"

Then you can use FindBox funcation to access a particular resource bundler (directory). The function is finding the correct absolute path for your resource files.

// find a rice.Box
templateBox, err := rice.FindBox("your-resource-directory")
if err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}
// get file contents as string
tmpl, err := templateBox.String("your_asset.tmpl")
if err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}

If you are executing go binary in your home directory, but your resource directory is located rice will lookup the correct path for that directory (relative to the location of yourApplication). This only works when the source is available to the machine executing the binary and was installed with go get or go install.

You can add assets by generating go source code, or append the resources to the executable as zip file:

Both methods require execution of rice command line tool before building the actual application.

Embedded resource as source code

It generates a source code that contains the embedded resources. Note that the generate files could be very large. The following commands are doing this for us:

$ rice embed-go

The invocation scans the current directory files for rice.FindBox call and identifies the directories that should be included as embedded resources in the generate files. The command generates a files per directory. They are named in the following format:

<directory-name>.rice-box.go
Embedded resource as an archive

The method appends a resource as a zip file to already built executable:

$ go build -o <program>
$ rice append --exec <program>

It makes compilation a lot faster and can be used with large resource files.

Embedded resource as an syso resource

This is experimental method that generates .syso file that is compiled by Go compiler. The following command generates the coff syso resource files per directory:

$ rice embed-syso
Appending resource

In a case when you provide a binary, without source. The rice tool analyses source code and finds call’s to rice.FindBox and adds the required directories to the executable binary.

You can serve a static resources over HTTP with the following code snippet:

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

Conclusion

I am glad to find out two friendly packages that manage embedded resources in Go applications. This gives a hudge advantage to use the approach that fits our product requirements.