How to get a free Go web server
Best things in life are free
I am a sucker for signing up for free things. Many lists of services that give me endless distraction. Here’s one of the lists: free-for.dev. I’ve checked out Alwaysdata and Serv00.com. Today, I’ll be mostly talking about the latter.
Serving Wasm where it couldn’t be served
One of the things that I have been experimenting on is using static sites with wasm modules to do quite dynamic things with using math.js. My repo, kelly-wasm, for example, is a simple app that calculates the kelly fraction from probability and reward-risk ratio.
However, I’ve notice that not all php static servers treat the wasm MIME type equally. Only alwaysdata does this and it does so with octet stream on the wasm type.
Alright so here’s where I looked to hack the server to do something other than php and django. In the terminal, you will find that there is a python cli program called devil that helps you manage the environment.
netcat test
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$ which nc
This should work but if it doesn’t you may need to activate binary execution using the devil cli tool.
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$ devil vhost port add tcp <random>
$ nc -l <random port>
Go to the browser or curl the address with the port number like this http://<your username>.serv00.net:<random port> and you get a connection.
If you give a proper HTTP respose header, something like this should give a hello world response:
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HTTP/1.1 200 OK
MIME-Version: 1.0
Server: Edited out
Content-length: 13
hello world
Surely enough, if a simple netcat response works then we can implement a server running a light weight go http server for dev purposes.
Go serving WASM
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git clone https://github.com/shaoyanji/kelly-wasm.git
cd kelly-wasm.git
make serve
If it doesn work, then editing the server.go and replacing the port to the opened port you have opened should do the trick.
And there you have it. Hacking a free server to run portable ephemeral dynamic server. I am not sure how well this would work unattended even a production grade web app because processes can be killed by a daemon. But since this server isn’t some docker container, this capability to run customized server content can be a boon to whatever projects you are trying to hack up.
Granted, it’s probably not that impressive since you can test locally. But when you are on the go and developing from an ipad or phone, it’s not a terrible to ssh via termux or terminus/ish to the server to test in a semi-live prod environment.