boyvinall/rice-example

This is a working example that shows how to bundle web files (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) directly into a Go program so you can distribute everything as a single executable file instead of juggling separate folders. Normally when you build a web application, you end up with a binary file and then a separate folder of assets, your CSS stylesheets, JavaScript files, images, and HTML templates. This example demonstrates a tool called go.rice that solves this problem. It lets you embed those web files into the binary itself, so a user only needs to download and run one file. The files get compressed automatically, so the binary doesn't balloon in size. What makes this approach clever is its flexibility. The tool can scan your binary and only include the directories you actually reference in your code, keeping things lean. There's also an "append" workflow where you distribute the binary first, and then users can add their own HTML and CSS files later, the tool appends them to the existing binary without rebuilding from scratch. Plus, if you ever need to extract the files out of a binary later, you can use standard unzip utilities to get them back. The example is minimal by design, it's meant to show developers how to wire this up in their own Go projects. If you're building a small web tool, API server with a web dashboard, or any Go application that needs to serve static files, this pattern eliminates the operational headache of managing assets separately. You'd follow the setup steps in the README (install dependencies, run the build), and then you'd have a self-contained executable ready to ship.