Written by Edd Turtle on gophercoding.com
on
(Updated: )

Download a File from a URL

This post shows you how to download a file in Go from the internet to your computer. We use the standard lib http.Get() and io.Copy() functions to help us with it. This function should be efficient as it will stream the data into the file, as aposed to downloading it all into memory, then to file. We also show an alternative below if you want to take the filename from the URL.

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package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"io"
	"net/http"
	"os"
)

func main() {

	fileUrl := "https://gophercoding.com/img/logo-original.png"

	// Download the file, params:
	// 1) name of file to save as
	// 2) URL to download FROM
	err := DownloadFile("saveas.png", fileUrl)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}

	fmt.Println("Downloaded: " + fileUrl)
}

// DownloadFile will download from a given url to a file. It will
// write as it downloads (useful for large files).
func DownloadFile(filepath string, url string) error {

	// Get the data
	resp, err := http.Get(url)
	if err != nil {
		return err
	}
	defer resp.Body.Close()

	// Create the file
	out, err := os.Create(filepath)
	if err != nil {
		return err
	}
	defer out.Close()

	// Write the body to file
	_, err = io.Copy(out, resp.Body)
	return err
}

golang download a file from url to local

Alternative Filename

In our example above, you needed to provide it with a file name to save as - but we can replace this, if we want, to use the original filename in the url. We’ve added a line to work out the filename from the url: path.Base(resp.Request.URL.String()).

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func DownloadFile(url string) error {

	// Get the data
	resp, err := http.Get(url)
	if err != nil {
		return err
	}
	defer resp.Body.Close()

	// Create the file
	filepath := path.Base(resp.Request.URL.String())
	out, err := os.Create(filepath)
	if err != nil {
		return err
	}
	defer out.Close()

	// Write the body to file
	_, err = io.Copy(out, resp.Body)
	return err
}
#download#file#io#copy#http#save#filename#stream
Author Edd Turtle

Edd is a PHP and Go developer who enjoys blogging about his experiences, mostly about creating and coding new things he's working on and is a big beliver in open-source and Linux.

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