Serving static content and handling 404 not found with Gorilla toolkit

Question

I recently asked about serving static content and handling 404 with Gorilla mux; when using Handle instead of PathPrefix, the app can serve the root page (http://localhost:8888):

func main() {
    r := mux.NewRouter()
    r.HandleFunc("/myService", ServiceHandler)
    r.Handle("/", http.FileServer(http.Dir("./static")))
    r.NotFoundHandler = http.HandlerFunc(notFound)
    l, _ := net.Listen("tcp", "8888")
    http.Serve(l, r)
}

However requests for pages within the root page (e.g. http://localhost:8888/demo/page1.html) get intercepted by the 404 handler. Is there any way to prevent this, while catching requests for non-existent pages or services? This is the directory structure:

...
main.go
static\
  | index.html
  demo\
    page1.html
    demo.js
    demo.css
    | jquery\
       | <js files>
    | images\
       | <png files>

Previous Question:

I am using the Gorilla mux toolkit to handle http requests in a web server app:

func main() {
    r := mux.NewRouter()
    r.HandleFunc("/myService", ServiceHandler)
    r.PathPrefix("/").Handler(http.FileServer(http.Dir("./static")))
    l, _ := net.Listen("tcp", "8888")
    http.Serve(l, r)
}

I want to add a handler for invalid URLS, but it is never called:

func main() {
    r := mux.NewRouter()
    r.HandleFunc("/myService", ServiceHandler)
    r.NotFoundHandler = http.HandlerFunc(notFound)
    r.PathPrefix("/").Handler(http.FileServer(http.Dir("static")))
    l, _ := net.Listen("tcp", "8888")
    http.Serve(l, r)
}

If I remove the static handler, the not found handler is called. However, the app needs to serve the static content, from a non-absolute path. Is there a way to combine that with 404 handling?

VonC VonC · Accepted Answer · 2015-05-05T11:47:28

I suspect r.PathPrefix("/").Handler() would match any path, making the notfound handler useless.

As mentioned in "route.go":

// Note that it does not treat slashes specially 
// ("`/foobar/`" will be matched by the prefix "`/foo`") 
// so you may want to use a trailing slash here.

If you are using PathPrefix (as in those tests), use it for a specific path, not for the generic "/".

Serving static content and handling 404 not found with Gorilla toolkit

1 Answers