How to serve up a JSON response using Go?

Other users were commenting that the Content-Type is plain/text when encoding.
You have to set the content type with w.Header().Set() first, then write the HTTP response code with w.WriteHeader().

If you call w.WriteHeader() first, then call w.Header().Set() after you will get plain/text.

An example handler might look like this:

func SomeHandler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    data := SomeStruct{}
    w.Header().Set("Content-Type", "application/json")
    w.WriteHeader(http.StatusCreated)
    json.NewEncoder(w).Encode(data)
}

In gobuffalo.io framework I got it to work like this:

// say we are in some resource Show action
// some code is omitted
user := &models.User{}
if c.Request().Header.Get("Content-type") == "application/json" {
    return c.Render(200, r.JSON(user))
} else {
    // Make user available inside the html template
    c.Set("user", user)
    return c.Render(200, r.HTML("users/show.html"))
}

and then when I want to get JSON response for that resource I have to set "Content-type" to "application/json" and it works.

I think Rails has more convenient way to handle multiple response types, I didn't see the same in gobuffalo so far.

You can set your content-type header so clients know to expect json

w.Header().Set("Content-Type", "application/json")

Another way to marshal a struct to json is to build an encoder using the http.ResponseWriter

// get a payload p := Payload{d}
json.NewEncoder(w).Encode(p)

You can do something like this in you getJsonResponse function -

jData, err := json.Marshal(Data)
if err != nil {
    // handle error
}
w.Header().Set("Content-Type", "application/json")
w.Write(jData)