A WebSocket (RFC 6455) client and server implementation for Go.
- No dependencies beyond the Go standard library.
- Built-in ping/pong liveness checks with per-read controls for keepalive cadence, pong deadlines, idle timeouts, and message progress bounds.
- Closing handshake support through the
ShutdownAPI: send a close code and reason, then collect the peer's response from the read loop. - Passes the complete WebSocket Autobahn test suite for all supported features.
go get github.com/garyburd/websocket
API documentation and examples covering clients, servers, reading, writing, and liveness options are available on pkg.go.dev.
For complete applications, see these examples:
- chat — a multi-user chat server.
- command — bridges a subprocess (a calculator by default) to a browser and demonstrates a message-scanning read loop built on the API.
Support for the permessage-deflate compression extension (RFC 7692) is planned but not yet implemented.
When writing gorilla/websocket, I made several design decisions that I later came to regret. Once those decisions became part of the public API, correcting them would have broken existing applications.
I wanted to build a gorilla/websocket v2 that addressed those issues, but for a long time the work was hard to justify: it was a substantial undertaking, and I no longer needed a WebSocket package myself.
That changed when a recent project required WebSockets. LLM assistance made it practical to turn the design into Go code, and this package is the result.