Gohta

Revived HTA with Go and Chrome

• Build desktop-like apps easily from HTML, similar to HTA.
• When you need more capability, extend it with Go.

Development Mode

To enable live reload functionality during development, run with the dev tag:

go run -tags dev . your-file.html

Features in Development Mode

• File Watching: Automatically watches for changes in HTML, CSS, JS, JSON, and XML files
• WebSocket Live Reload: Establishes WebSocket connection for real-time communication
• Automatic Browser Refresh: Browser automatically refreshes when files are modified
• Debounced Updates: Prevents multiple rapid reloads when multiple files change

Usage

# Build in development mode
go build -tags dev

# Run with your HTML file
./gohta your-file.html

The browser will automatically refresh whenever you save changes to your HTML, CSS, or JavaScript files.

Self-Contained App Mode

gohta can also run as a self-contained application. By placing your entire website (including index.html, CSS, images, etc.) into a static directory, gohta will automatically embed these files into the executable at build time.

How It Works

1. Create a static Directory: Place all your web assets in a directory named static at the root of the project.
2. Automatic Detection: When the application starts, it checks for the existence of a static/index.html file within the embedded assets.
3. Self-Contained Serving: If static/index.html is found, gohta switches to "self-contained mode" and serves all content from the embedded static directory. It will no longer require a file path argument.

Usage

To build a self-contained application with your site embedded:

# Place your site in the 'static' directory
echo "<h1>Hello from self-contained mode!</h1>" > static/index.html

# Build the application
go build

# Run the self-contained app
./gohta

The application will now serve your index.html and all other assets from the static directory, completely from within the executable.

Windows Builds: with or without console

On Windows, you can choose whether the app shows a console window.

• With console (default):

# Shows console window (useful for logs)
go build

• Without console (hide console window):

# Build a GUI executable without a console window
go build -ldflags "-H=windowsgui"