Lectures

We break down how to implement graceful shutdown for an HTTP server in Go: turn OS signals into context cancellation via signal.NotifyContext, correctly wait for shutdown via <- ctx . Done() without polling loops, run ListenAndServe() in a goroutine, and don’t treat http.ErrServerClosed as a crash. At the end, there’s a set of common mistakes that most often break a “clean shutdown”.

We break down how graceful HTTP server shutdown works via (*http.Server).Shutdown(ctx), why a context without a deadline is dangerous, and which “canonical” template to use: context.WithTimeout, defer cancel (), proper logging of context.DeadlineExceeded, and filtering http.ErrServerClosed. We will also show graceful shutdown in main () via signal.NotifyContext.

We’ll break down why an HTTP server needs timeouts and how they “cut off” different stages of a connection’s lifecycle: reading headers ( ReadHeaderTimeout), reading the entire request ( ReadTimeout), writing the response ( WriteTimeout), and keep-alive idling ( IdleTimeout). Using examples with net/http and http.Server, we’ll assemble the configuration in one place and discuss common configuration mistakes.

We break down how to correctly react to HTTP request cancellation in net/http via r . Context (): why you should check ctx . Err (), how to “carry” context.Context through layers, how to do “long” work in chunks and set internal timeouts via context . WithTimeout (), and which typical mistakes lead to pointless load on the server.

We break down how to correctly stop background goroutines when shutting down an HTTP server: why you need an application-level context ( appCtx), why r.Context() is almost never suitable for “long-running background” work, how to tie cancellation to srv.RegisterOnShutdown, and how to wait for background work to finish via the done channel so the process exits predictably and without hangs.