websocket

websocket is a minimal and idiomatic WebSocket library for Go.

Install

go get nhooyr.io/websocket

Features

Minimal and idiomatic API
Tiny codebase at 2200 lines
First class context.Context support
Thorough tests, fully passes the autobahn-testsuite
Zero dependencies
JSON and ProtoBuf helpers in the wsjson and wspb subpackages
Highly optimized by default
Concurrent writes out of the box
Complete Wasm support
Close handshake

Roadmap

Compression Extensions #163
HTTP/2 #4

Examples

For a production quality example that shows off the full API, see the echo example on the godoc. On github, the example is at example_echo_test.go.

Use the errors.As function new in Go 1.13 to check for websocket.CloseError. There is also websocket.CloseStatus to quickly grab the close status code out of a websocket.CloseError. See the CloseStatus godoc example.

Server

http.HandlerFunc(func (w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
	c, err := websocket.Accept(w, r, nil)
	if err != nil {
		// ...
	}
	defer c.Close(websocket.StatusInternalError, "the sky is falling")

	ctx, cancel := context.WithTimeout(r.Context(), time.Second*10)
	defer cancel()

	var v interface{}
	err = wsjson.Read(ctx, c, &v)
	if err != nil {
		// ...
	}

	log.Printf("received: %v", v)

	c.Close(websocket.StatusNormalClosure, "")
})

Client

ctx, cancel := context.WithTimeout(context.Background(), time.Minute)
defer cancel()

c, _, err := websocket.Dial(ctx, "ws://localhost:8080", nil)
if err != nil {
	// ...
}
defer c.Close(websocket.StatusInternalError, "the sky is falling")

err = wsjson.Write(ctx, c, "hi")
if err != nil {
	// ...
}

c.Close(websocket.StatusNormalClosure, "")

Design justifications

A minimal API is easier to maintain due to less docs, tests and bugs
A minimal API is also easier to use and learn
Context based cancellation is more ergonomic and robust than setting deadlines
net.Conn is never exposed as WebSocket over HTTP/2 will not have a net.Conn.
Using net/http's Client for dialing means we do not have to reinvent dialing hooks and configurations like other WebSocket libraries

Comparison

Before the comparison, I want to point out that both gorilla/websocket and gobwas/ws were extremely useful in implementing the WebSocket protocol correctly so big thanks to the authors of both. In particular, I made sure to go through the issue tracker of gorilla/websocket to ensure I implemented details correctly and understood how people were using WebSockets in production.

gorilla/websocket

https://github.com/gorilla/websocket

The implementation of gorilla/websocket is 6 years old. As such, it is widely used and very mature compared to nhooyr.io/websocket.

On the other hand, it has grown organically and now there are too many ways to do the same thing. Compare the godoc of nhooyr/websocket with gorilla/websocket side by side.

The API for nhooyr.io/websocket has been designed such that there is only one way to do things. This makes it easy to use correctly. Not only is the API simpler, the implementation is only 2200 lines whereas gorilla/websocket is at 3500 lines. That's more code to maintain, more code to test, more code to document and more surface area for bugs.

Moreover, nhooyr.io/websocket supports newer Go idioms such as context.Context. It also uses net/http's Client and ResponseWriter directly for WebSocket handshakes. gorilla/websocket writes its handshakes to the underlying net.Conn. Thus it has to reinvent hooks for TLS and proxies and prevents support of HTTP/2.

Some more advantages of nhooyr.io/websocket are that it supports concurrent writes and makes it very easy to close the connection with a status code and reason. In fact, nhooyr.io/websocket even implements the complete WebSocket close handshake for you whereas with gorilla/websocket you have to perform it manually. See gorilla/websocket#448.

The ping API is also nicer. gorilla/websocket requires registering a pong handler on the Conn which results in awkward control flow. With nhooyr.io/websocket you use the Ping method on the Conn that sends a ping and also waits for the pong.

Additionally, nhooyr.io/websocket can compile to Wasm for the browser.

In terms of performance, the differences mostly depend on your application code. nhooyr.io/websocket reuses message buffers out of the box if you use the wsjson and wspb subpackages. As mentioned above, nhooyr.io/websocket also supports concurrent writers.

The WebSocket masking algorithm used by this package is also 1.75x faster than gorilla/websocket or gobwas/ws while using only pure safe Go.

The only performance con to nhooyr.io/websocket is that it uses one extra goroutine to support cancellation with context.Context. This costs 2 KB of memory which is cheap compared to the benefits.

x/net/websocket

https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/net/websocket

Unmaintained and the API does not reflect WebSocket semantics. Should never be used.

See golang/go#18152

gobwas/ws

https://github.com/gobwas/ws

This library has an extremely flexible API but that comes at the cost of usability and clarity.

This library is fantastic in terms of performance. The author put in significant effort to ensure its speed and I have applied as many of its optimizations as I could into nhooyr.io/websocket. Definitely check out his fantastic blog post about performant WebSocket servers.

If you want a library that gives you absolute control over everything, this is the library. But for 99.9% of use cases, nhooyr.io/websocket will fit better. It's nearly as performant but much easier to use.

Contributing

See .github/CONTRIBUTING.md.

Users

If your company or project is using this library, feel free to open an issue or PR to amend this list.

Coder
Tatsu Works - Ingresses 20 TB in websocket data every month on their Discord bot.

ronakg/websocket