In Chapter 1, Introducing and Setting Up, we produced a very basic URL endpoint that allowed static file serving.

The following are the simple routes we produced for that example:

func main() {
  http.HandleFunc("/static",serveStatic)
  http.HandleFunc("/",serveDynamic)
  http.ListenAndServe(Port,nil)
}

In review, you can see two endpoints, /static and /, which either serve a single static file or generate output to the http.ResponseWriter.

We can have any number of routers sitting side by side. However, consider a scenario where we have a basic website with about, contact, and staff pages, with each residing in /var/www/about/index.html, /var/www/contact.html, and /var/www/staff/home.html. While it's an intentionally obtuse example, it demonstrates the limitations of Go's built-in and unmodified routing system. We cannot route all requests to the same directory locally, we need something that provides more malleable URLs.