htpack/README.md

HTTP resource pack server

A common scenario is that you have a set of static resources that you want to serve up quickly via HTTP (for example: stylesheets, WASM).

This package provides a net/http-compatible http.Handler to do so, with support for:

• compression
  • gzip
  • brotli, if you have the external compression binary available at pack time
  • does not yet support Transfer-Encoding, only Accept-Encoding/Content-Encoding
• etags
• ranges

The workflow is as follows:

• (optional) build YAML file describing files to serve
• run htpacker tool to produce a single .htpack file
• create htpack.Handler pointing at .htpack file

The handler can easily be combined with middleware (http.StripPrefix etc.).

Range handling notes

Too many bugs have been found with range handling and composite ranges, so the handler only accepts a single range within the limits of the file. Anything else will be ignored.

The interaction between range handling and compression also seems a little ill-defined; as we have pre-compressed data, however, we can consistently serve the exact same byte data for compressed files.