How to set HTTP status code on http.ResponseWriter

Question

How do I set the HTTP status code on an http.ResponseWriter (e.g. to 500 or 403)?

I can see that requests normally have a status code of 200 attached to the

Answer 1

Use http.ResponseWriter.WriteHeader. From the documentation:

WriteHeader sends an HTTP response header with status code. If WriteHeader is not called explicitly, the first call to Write will trigger an implicit WriteHeader(http.StatusOK). Thus explicit calls to WriteHeader are mainly used to send error codes.

Example:

func ServeHTTP(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    w.WriteHeader(http.StatusInternalServerError)
    w.Write([]byte("500 - Something bad happened!"))
}