Golang. What to use? http.ServeFile(..) or http.FileServer(..)?

I'm a little bit confused. Much of examples shows usage of both: http.ServeFile(..) and http.FileServer(..), but seems they have very close functionality. Also I have found no information about how to set custom NotFound handler.

// This works and strip "/static/" fragment from path
fs := http.FileServer(http.Dir("static"))
http.Handle("/static/", http.StripPrefix("/static/", fs))

// This works too, but "/static2/" fragment remains and need to be striped manually
http.HandleFunc("/static2/", func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    http.ServeFile(w, r, r.URL.Path[1:])
})

http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)

I've tried to read source code and both of them use serveFile(ResponseWriter, *Request, FileSystem, string, bool) underlying function. However http.FileServer return fileHandler with its own ServeHTTP() method and make some preparation work before serving file (eg path.Clean()).

So why need this separation? Which method better to use? And how can I set custom NotFound handler, for example when requested file not found?

The main difference is that http.FileServer does effectively almost 1:1 mapping of an HTTP prefix with a filesystem. In plain english, it serves up an entire directory path. and all its children.

Say you had a directory called /home/bob/static and you had this setup:

fs := http.FileServer(http.Dir("/home/bob/static"))
http.Handle("/static/", http.StripPrefix("/static", fs))

Your server would take requests for e.g. /static/foo/bar and serve whatever is at /home/bob/static/foo/bar (or 404)

In contrast, the ServeFile is a lower level helper that can be used to implement something similar to FileServer, or implement your own path munging potentially, and any number of things. It simply takes the named local file and sends it over the HTTP connection. By itself, it won't serve a whole directory prefix (unless you wrote a handler that did some lookup similar to FileServer)

NOTE Serving up a filesystem naively is a potentially dangerous thing (there are potentially ways to break out of the rooted tree) hence I recommend that unless you really know what you're doing, use http.FileServer and http.Dir as they include checks to make sure people can't break out of the FS, which ServeFile doesn't.

Addendum Your secondary question, how do you do a custom NotFound handler, unfortunately, is not easily answered. Because this is called from internal function serveFile as you noticed, there's no super easy place to break into that. There are potentially some sneaky things like intercepting the response with your own ResponseWriter which intercepts the 404 response code, but I'll leave that exercise to you.

Here a handler which sends a redirect to "/" if file is not found. This comes in handy when adding a fallback for an Angular application, as suggested here, which is served from within a golang service.

Note: This code is not production ready. Only illustrative (at best :-)

    package main

    import "net/http"
    
    type (
    	// FallbackResponseWriter wraps an http.Requesthandler and surpresses
    	// a 404 status code. In such case a given local file will be served.
    	FallbackResponseWriter struct {
    		WrappedResponseWriter http.ResponseWriter
    		FileNotFound          bool
    	}
    )
    
    // Header returns the header of the wrapped response writer
    func (frw *FallbackResponseWriter) Header() http.Header {
    	return frw.WrappedResponseWriter.Header()
    }
    
    // Write sends bytes to wrapped response writer, in case of FileNotFound
    // It surpresses further writes (concealing the fact though)
    func (frw *FallbackResponseWriter) Write(b []byte) (int, error) {
    	if frw.FileNotFound {
    		return len(b), nil
    	}
    	return frw.WrappedResponseWriter.Write(b)
    }
    
    // WriteHeader sends statusCode to wrapped response writer
    func (frw *FallbackResponseWriter) WriteHeader(statusCode int) {
    	Log.Printf("INFO: WriteHeader called with code %d\n", statusCode)
    	if statusCode == http.StatusNotFound {
    		Log.Printf("INFO: Setting FileNotFound flag\n")
    		frw.FileNotFound = true
    		return
    	}
    	frw.WrappedResponseWriter.WriteHeader(statusCode)
    }
    
    // AddFallbackHandler wraps the handler func in another handler func covering authentication
    func AddFallbackHandler(handler http.HandlerFunc, filename string) http.HandlerFunc {
    	Log.Printf("INFO: Creating fallback handler")
    	return func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    		Log.Printf("INFO: Wrapping response writer in fallback response writer")
    		frw := FallbackResponseWriter{
    			WrappedResponseWriter: w,
    			FileNotFound:          false,
    		}
    		handler(&frw, r)
    		if frw.FileNotFound {
    			Log.Printf("INFO: Serving fallback")
    			http.Redirect(w, r, "/", http.StatusSeeOther)
    		}
    	}
    }

It can be added as in this example (using goji as mux):

	mux.Handle(pat.Get("/*"),
		AddFallbackHandler(http.FileServer(http.Dir("./html")).ServeHTTP, "/"))