How can I implement an inactivity timeout on an http download - http

Question

I've been reading up on the various timeouts that are available on an http request and they all seem to act as hard deadlines on the total time of a request.
I am running an http download, I don't want to implement a hard timeout past the initial handshake as I don't know anything about my users connection and don't want to timeout on slow connections. What I would ideally like is to timeout after a period of inactivity (when nothing has been downloaded for x seconds). Is there any way to do this as a built in or do I have to interrupt based on stating the file?
The working code is a little hard to isolate but I think these are the relevant parts, there is another loop that stats the file to provide progress but I will need to refactor a bit to use this to interrupt the download:
// httspClientOnNetInterface returns an http client using the named network interface, (via proxy if passed)
func HttpsClientOnNetInterface(interfaceIP []byte, httpsProxy *Proxy) (*http.Client, error) {
log.Printf("Got IP addr : %s\n", string(interfaceIP))
// create address for the dialer
tcpAddr := &net.TCPAddr{
IP: interfaceIP,
}
// create the dialer & transport
netDialer := net.Dialer{
LocalAddr: tcpAddr,
}
var proxyURL *url.URL
var err error
if httpsProxy != nil {
proxyURL, err = url.Parse(httpsProxy.String())
if err != nil {
return nil, fmt.Errorf("Error parsing proxy connection string: %s", err)
}
}
httpTransport := &http.Transport{
Dial: netDialer.Dial,
Proxy: http.ProxyURL(proxyURL),
}
httpClient := &http.Client{
Transport: httpTransport,
}
return httpClient, nil
}
/*
StartDownloadWithProgress will initiate a download from a remote url to a local file,
providing download progress information
*/
func StartDownloadWithProgress(interfaceIP []byte, httpsProxy *Proxy, srcURL, dstFilepath string) (*Download, error) {
// start an http client on the selected net interface
httpClient, err := HttpsClientOnNetInterface(interfaceIP, httpsProxy)
if err != nil {
return nil, err
}
// grab the header
headResp, err := httpClient.Head(srcURL)
if err != nil {
log.Printf("error on head request (download size): %s", err)
return nil, err
}
// pull out total size
size, err := strconv.Atoi(headResp.Header.Get("Content-Length"))
if err != nil {
headResp.Body.Close()
return nil, err
}
headResp.Body.Close()
errChan := make(chan error)
doneChan := make(chan struct{})
// spawn the download process
go func(httpClient *http.Client, srcURL, dstFilepath string, errChan chan error, doneChan chan struct{}) {
resp, err := httpClient.Get(srcURL)
if err != nil {
errChan <- err
return
}
defer resp.Body.Close()
// create the file
outFile, err := os.Create(dstFilepath)
if err != nil {
errChan <- err
return
}
defer outFile.Close()
log.Println("starting copy")
// copy to file as the response arrives
_, err = io.Copy(outFile, resp.Body)
// return err
if err != nil {
log.Printf("\n Download Copy Error: %s \n", err.Error())
errChan <- err
return
}
doneChan <- struct{}{}
return
}(httpClient, srcURL, dstFilepath, errChan, doneChan)
// return Download
return (&Download{
updateFrequency: time.Microsecond * 500,
total: size,
errRecieve: errChan,
doneRecieve: doneChan,
filepath: dstFilepath,
}).Start(), nil
}
Update
Thanks to everyone who had input into this.
I've accepted JimB's answer as it seems like a perfectly viable approach that is more generalised than the solution I chose (and probably more useful to anyone who finds their way here).
In my case I already had a loop monitoring the file size so I threw a named error when this did not change for x seconds. It was much easier for me to pick up on the named error through my existing error handling and retry the download from there.
I probably crash at least one goroutine in the background with my approach (I may fix this later with some signalling) but as this is a short running application (its an installer) so this is acceptable (at least tolerable)

Answer 1

Doing the copy manually is not particularly difficult. If you're unsure how to properly implement it, it's only a couple dozen lines from the io package to copy and modify to suit your needs (I only removed the ErrShortWrite clause, because we can assume that the std library io.Writer implementations are correct)
Here is a copy work-alike function, that also takes a cancelation context and an idle timeout parameter. Every time there is a successful read, it signals to the cancelation goroutine to continue and start a new timer.
func idleTimeoutCopy(dst io.Writer, src io.Reader, timeout time.Duration,
ctx context.Context, cancel context.CancelFunc) (written int64, err error) {
read := make(chan int)
go func() {
for {
select {
case <-ctx.Done():
return
case <-time.After(timeout):
cancel()
case <-read:
}
}
}()
buf := make([]byte, 32*1024)
for {
nr, er := src.Read(buf)
if nr > 0 {
read <- nr
nw, ew := dst.Write(buf[0:nr])
written += int64(nw)
if ew != nil {
err = ew
break
}
}
if er != nil {
if er != io.EOF {
err = er
}
break
}
}
return written, err
}
While I used time.After for brevity, it's more efficient to reuse the Timer. This means taking care to use the correct reset pattern, as the return value of the Reset function is broken:
t := time.NewTimer(timeout)
for {
select {
case <-ctx.Done():
return
case <-t.C:
cancel()
case <-read:
if !t.Stop() {
<-t.C
}
t.Reset(timeout)
}
}
You could skip calling Stop altogether here, since in my opinion if the timer fires while calling Reset, it was close enough to cancel anyway, but it's often good to have the code be idiomatic in case this code is extended in the future.