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net/http

In this course, we'll be using Go's standard net/http package and the http.Client to make HTTP requests. In fact, we've already been using it! The http.Get function uses the http.DefaultClient under the hood.

Making a Request

 
import (
	"fmt"
	"io"
	"net/http"
)

func getProjects() ([]byte, error) {
	res, err := http.Get("https://api.jello.com/projects")
	if err != nil {
		return nil, fmt.Errorf("error making request: %w", err)
	}
	defer res.Body.Close()

	data, err := io.ReadAll(res.Body)
	if err != nil {
		return nil, fmt.Errorf("error reading response: %w", err)
	}
	return data, nil
}

We'll go in-depth on the various things happening here later, but let's cover some basics for now.

  • http.Get uses the http.DefaultClient to make a request to the given url
  • res is the HTTP response that comes back from the server
  • defer res.Body.Close() ensures that the response body is properly closed after reading. Not doing so can cause memory issues.
  • io.ReadAll reads the response body into a slice of bytes []byte called data

Assignment

There is a bug in the getIssueData function! It's returning the entire http.Response instead of the data from the body (a slice of bytes). Fix it so that it returns []byte.