freeCodeCamp/guide/english/go/receive-data-with-your-webserver/index.md

title
Receive data with your web server

Once you've set up your web server and made sure it can serve some useful content, you might want to make it more interactive by letting it accept data. Let's get started by writing some code:

package main

import (
  "net/http"
  "html/template"
)

type Page struct {
  Name string
}

var page Page

func main() {
  http.HandleFunc("/", servePage)
  http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
}

func servePage(writer http.ResponseWriter, reqest *http.Request) {
  page.Name = request.FormValue("name")
  template := template.New("sayHello")
  template, _ = template.Parse("Hello {{.Name}}!")
  template.Execute(writer, page)
}

Let's break this code down. First off all, we start by importing net/http for the web server and html/template for the templating. This article assumes you already know how to template in Go. If you don't know this yet, you should read the article on templating first.

Then we create a type called PAGE, with one slot in it called NAME (this is a string). We also create a global variable called page which is of type PAGE: the struct we just made.

In the servePage function there is one thing that is really important for this article: the FormValue method we run on the request.

Before we continue you first need to know how a URL is built. Let's take the following URL as an example:

https://google.com/search?q=free+code+camp

If you enter the URL above in your browser, it will perform a Google search for free code camp. The URL is built like this:

1. https:// - this is the protocol
2. google.com - this is the domain name and port (in this case there is no port mentioned - so the browser uses the default port for the protocol)
3. /search - this is the path
4. q=free+code+camp - this is the query

The query is the part we talk about in this article. The Google server sees this URL and because of the attribute q in the query and the value of q - in this case free+code+camp - it knows where it should search for.

We can also apply this to our server. Let's fire up the program and navigate the browser to:

http://localhost:8080/?name=world

The response will be:

Hello world!

How does this work? Well, we gave the FormValue a parameter of name. This way FormValue knows we want the value of the name attribute in the query. In this case that is world, so the method returns world. That string is then put in the page variable and the template does the rest.

This is of course a really simple implementation of this function, but you could do a lot of things with it. For example: you could accept email addresses and let the program store those in a file.