dws

dws (desktop web server) is a simple http fileserver app. It can be used to run an http server on a Mac as a native Mac application with a native Mac UI using Apple's Cocoa framework. This project functions primarily as an exploration into writing a Go application with a native UI. The app is very similar to Python's SimpleHTTP server, but demonstrates how to produce a single statically linked binary that integrates both the desktop UI and the webserver, running in a shared memory environment.

download

Compiled applications will be posted on the releases page on the project's github. You should be able to download the zip, unzip it, and run the app inside. I've only tested it on macOS Sierra so far.

build

Building this project requires that you have compilers for Go, C, and Objective-C, as well as the necessary header files for Cocoa. In practice, this only means having a Go compiler and the XCode command-line tools, since the XCode command-line tools will give you everything you need for developing Cocoa applications. You do not need to use XCode or Interface builder to compile or work on this project. Given a Go compiler and clang, the process for building the executable is as follows:

go build

The Go tool will invoke clang for you automatically. There are no nib files or resource files. Be aware that this will produce only a binary file, it will not produce an App bundle. The Go tool is not aware of the App Bundle structure, it is only responsible for building the executable.

building an app bundle

Building an App Bundle is reasonably straightforward. The App Bundle is just a special folder layout. A Makefile is included in the project to simplify this task. If you have Make, you can build and assemble a fresh App Bundle as follows:

make

If you don't have Make, you can recreate the folder structure by hand:

dws.app/
└── Contents
    ├── Info.plist
    └── MacOS
        └── dws