Uploading and Downloading Binary Files

Let’s learn how to upload and download binary files through the /files/ endpoint.

We'll cover the following

Coding example
Let’s try our code

It is not unusual to need to store binary files in a RESTful server and being able to download them afterward—for example, for developing photo libraries or document libraries. This lesson illustrates how to implement that functionality.

Coding example

For reasons of simplicity, the example is going to be included in the Educative-Content/rest-api GitHub repository used earlier for implementing the RESTful server. For this lesson, we are going to be using the file directory to store the relevant code, which is saved as binary.go. In reality, binary.go is a small RESTful server that only supports the uploading and downloading of binary files through the /files/ endpoint.

There exist three main ways to save the files we upload:

On the local filesystem
On a database management system that supports the storing of binary files
On the cloud using a cloud provider

In our case, we are storing the files on the filesystem the server runs on. More specifically, we are storing uploaded files under /tmp/files as we are testing things.

The code of binary.go is as follows:

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Course Introduction

Introduction to Go

Basic Go Data Types

Composite Data Types

Reflection and Interfaces

Go Packages and Functions

Telling a UNIX System What to Do

Go Concurrency

Building Web Services

Working with TCP/IP and WebSocket

Working with REST APIs

Code Testing and Profiling

Working with gRPC

Go Generics

Conclusion

Appendix A—Go Garbage Collector

Uploading and Downloading Binary Files

Coding example