So I've obviously been playing around with Go for a little while. I'd say now I've put in like 20-30 hours of good productive learning and coding in Go. I basically rewrote the blog display of this website in Go, connecting to MongoDB and stuff, using Go html/template, downloaded Gorilla Web Toolkit (AWESOME BTW), and tried to write very modular code that can be reused for other websites.  However, there was that question of "other websites"?  Each Go program compiles into its own program, calling the http.ListenAndServe() on the port specified, which when hosted on www.jasontconnell.com, would have to be 80.

I was playing with ideas in my head, like having a server.exe (obviously not .exe when I run it on Linux), which runs on port 80, and listens on another port for websites to register with it.

Server.exe starts up, jtccom.exe starts up, sends a message through RPC or some other network protocol that says "Yo, sup. If you would be so kind to send requests for jasontconnell.com to me, that'd be mighty generous of you." Server.exe would make note of the domain name and port that it's running on, and forward requests to it. This could also be done through a config file as well. But that would mean writing another full featured webserver in Go. I've already done one in Node.js, in Go it would be a bit easier since it's more fully featured as a webserver (including a template engine), and seems a bit faster. It wouldn't be as much work as doing it in Node because of the fact that templates are included (if you want to see some interesting code, ask me for my Node.js template engine code). But as John Carmack once said, "I don't think I have another engine in me".

Wanting to avoid writing another web server, I googled "host multiple Golang websites" (you have to add golang instead of go since go is such a generic term).  I found this article, which is hosting Go websites with Nginx, and also covered a lot of other things I won't be doing. Using that article, I was able to download Nginx, set it up with some minimal configuration, and had two Go websites up and running successfully.  I would have commented on that article to thank the author, but it required a login.

Here is the configuration in my nginx.conf file. This is within the main server node within the config (I also like how the config file is structured)

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name jtccom;
    location / {
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_pass http://jtccom:8080;
    }
    }

    server {
    listen 80;
    server_name stringed;
    location / {
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_pass http://stringed:8081;
    }
    }

Then I was able to hit http://jtccom and http://stringed with both of those programs running.

This has a lot of implications. With Node, I was running everything as root. Since I can put these on ports 44444 if I wanted to, I can run these as a non-root user, increasing the security in the process. My other server where this site was hosted was hit with a virus or something that crashed the site for a few days.  My dev machine is on Windows, so it's not immediate and I wasn't getting the teen response time when just hitting the Go process directly, but that should speed up on Linux when the sites are ready to launch. Another implication is that I can continue down my path of fully committing to Go for future development, since the hosting issue is solved. I could still go down the path of writing my barebones server with proxying capabilities in Go if the Nginx server doesn't work out completely, speed-wise.

I'm intrigued by the possibilities in Go. Writing small code that is mind blowing, compiled, fast, runs on multiple different systems, has a huge corporate backing, and is just fun to write. My first foray into it a couple of months ago was just "Hmm... I have no idea what I'm looking at", which is my brain's way of saying "you should learn that". Fun stuff.