Network Requests and HTTP Servers

fetch: a global HTTP client

const r = await fetch("https://httpbin.org/get?name=zed")
console.log(r.status, r.ok)             // 200 true
console.log(await r.text())

// POST request
const r2 = await fetch("https://httpbin.org/post", {
  method: "POST",
  body: JSON.stringify({ hello: "gox" }),
  headers: { "Content-Type": "application/json" }
})
const data = await r2.json()

Response only exposes the read methods text() / json() — there is no blob() / arrayBuffer() / stream().

http.createServer: the HTTP server side

http is also a global object, offering the client methods get / request plus createServer for servers:

// server.js
const server = http.createServer(function (req, res) {
  if (req.path === "/json") {
    res.writeHead(200, { "Content-Type": "application/json" })
    res.end(JSON.stringify({ msg: "hi " + req.query.name, method: req.method }))
  } else {
    res.end("hello world")
  }
})

server.listen(8080, function () {
  console.log("listening on http://127.0.0.1:8080")
})

$ gox server.js
listening on http://127.0.0.1:8080

# verify in another terminal
$ curl "http://127.0.0.1:8080/json?name=zed"
{"msg":"hi zed","method":"GET"}

• The request object req: method, url, path, query (parsed query parameters), headers, body
• The response object res: writeHead(status, headers), setHeader/removeHeader/getHeader, write, end(body), statusCode
• server.listen(0, cb) — passing 0 means a random port; the actual port is written to server.port; server.close() shuts it down
• Inside the handler you can await or use setTimeout to delay end; the server keeps the task alive on the event loop until the response completes

Concurrency model

Network callbacks run on Go goroutines, then get scheduled back to the VM for single-threaded execution — your JS code is always single-threaded; no locking needed.