Lazy Load

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for exmaple, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package log15 provides an opinionated, simple toolkit for best-practice logging that is both human and machine readable. It is modeled after the standard library's io and net/http packages. This package enforces you to only log key/value pairs. Keys must be strings. Values may be any type that you like. The default output format is logfmt, but you may also choose to use JSON instead if that suits you. Here's how you log: This will output a line that looks like: To get started, you'll want to import the library: Now you're ready to start logging: Because recording a human-meaningful message is common and good practice, the first argument to every logging method is the value to the *implicit* key 'msg'. Additionally, the level you choose for a message will be automatically added with the key 'lvl', and so will the current timestamp with key 't'. You may supply any additional context as a set of key/value pairs to the logging function. log15 allows you to favor terseness, ordering, and speed over safety. This is a reasonable tradeoff for logging functions. You don't need to explicitly state keys/values, log15 understands that they alternate in the variadic argument list: If you really do favor your type-safety, you may choose to pass a log.Ctx instead: Frequently, you want to add context to a logger so that you can track actions associated with it. An http request is a good example. You can easily create new loggers that have context that is automatically included with each log line: This will output a log line that includes the path context that is attached to the logger: The Handler interface defines where log lines are printed to and how they are formated. Handler is a single interface that is inspired by net/http's handler interface: Handlers can filter records, format them, or dispatch to multiple other Handlers. This package implements a number of Handlers for common logging patterns that are easily composed to create flexible, custom logging structures. Here's an example handler that prints logfmt output to Stdout: Here's an example handler that defers to two other handlers. One handler only prints records from the rpc package in logfmt to standard out. The other prints records at Error level or above in JSON formatted output to the file /var/log/service.json This package implements three Handlers that add debugging information to the context, CallerFileHandler, CallerFuncHandler and CallerStackHandler. Here's an example that adds the source file and line number of each logging call to the context. This will output a line that looks like: Here's an example that logs the call stack rather than just the call site. This will output a line that looks like: The "%+v" format instructs the handler to include the path of the source file relative to the compile time GOPATH. The github.com/go-stack/stack package documents the full list of formatting verbs and modifiers available. The Handler interface is so simple that it's also trivial to write your own. Let's create an example handler which tries to write to one handler, but if that fails it falls back to writing to another handler and includes the error that it encountered when trying to write to the primary. This might be useful when trying to log over a network socket, but if that fails you want to log those records to a file on disk. This pattern is so useful that a generic version that handles an arbitrary number of Handlers is included as part of this library called FailoverHandler. Sometimes, you want to log values that are extremely expensive to compute, but you don't want to pay the price of computing them if you haven't turned up your logging level to a high level of detail. This package provides a simple type to annotate a logging operation that you want to be evaluated lazily, just when it is about to be logged, so that it would not be evaluated if an upstream Handler filters it out. Just wrap any function which takes no arguments with the log.Lazy type. For example: If this message is not logged for any reason (like logging at the Error level), then factorRSAKey is never evaluated. The same log.Lazy mechanism can be used to attach context to a logger which you want to be evaluated when the message is logged, but not when the logger is created. For example, let's imagine a game where you have Player objects: You always want to log a player's name and whether they're alive or dead, so when you create the player object, you might do: Only now, even after a player has died, the logger will still report they are alive because the logging context is evaluated when the logger was created. By using the Lazy wrapper, we can defer the evaluation of whether the player is alive or not to each log message, so that the log records will reflect the player's current state no matter when the log message is written: If log15 detects that stdout is a terminal, it will configure the default handler for it (which is log.StdoutHandler) to use TerminalFormat. This format logs records nicely for your terminal, including color-coded output based on log level. Becasuse log15 allows you to step around the type system, there are a few ways you can specify invalid arguments to the logging functions. You could, for example, wrap something that is not a zero-argument function with log.Lazy or pass a context key that is not a string. Since logging libraries are typically the mechanism by which errors are reported, it would be onerous for the logging functions to return errors. Instead, log15 handles errors by making these guarantees to you: - Any log record containing an error will still be printed with the error explained to you as part of the log record. - Any log record containing an error will include the context key LOG15_ERROR, enabling you to easily (and if you like, automatically) detect if any of your logging calls are passing bad values. Understanding this, you might wonder why the Handler interface can return an error value in its Log method. Handlers are encouraged to return errors only if they fail to write their log records out to an external source like if the syslog daemon is not responding. This allows the construction of useful handlers which cope with those failures like the FailoverHandler. log15 is intended to be useful for library authors as a way to provide configurable logging to users of their library. Best practice for use in a library is to always disable all output for your logger by default and to provide a public Logger instance that consumers of your library can configure. Like so: Users of your library may then enable it if they like: The ability to attach context to a logger is a powerful one. Where should you do it and why? I favor embedding a Logger directly into any persistent object in my application and adding unique, tracing context keys to it. For instance, imagine I am writing a web browser: When a new tab is created, I assign a logger to it with the url of the tab as context so it can easily be traced through the logs. Now, whenever we perform any operation with the tab, we'll log with its embedded logger and it will include the tab title automatically: There's only one problem. What if the tab url changes? We could use log.Lazy to make sure the current url is always written, but that would mean that we couldn't trace a tab's full lifetime through our logs after the user navigate to a new URL. Instead, think about what values to attach to your loggers the same way you think about what to use as a key in a SQL database schema. If it's possible to use a natural key that is unique for the lifetime of the object, do so. But otherwise, log15's ext package has a handy RandId function to let you generate what you might call "surrogate keys" They're just random hex identifiers to use for tracing. Back to our Tab example, we would prefer to set up our Logger like so: Now we'll have a unique traceable identifier even across loading new urls, but we'll still be able to see the tab's current url in the log messages. For all Handler functions which can return an error, there is a version of that function which will return no error but panics on failure. They are all available on the Must object. For example: All of the following excellent projects inspired the design of this library: code.google.com/p/log4go github.com/op/go-logging github.com/technoweenie/grohl github.com/Sirupsen/logrus github.com/kr/logfmt github.com/spacemonkeygo/spacelog golang's stdlib, notably io and net/http https://xkcd.com/927/

Package log15 provides an opinionated, simple toolkit for best-practice logging that is both human and machine readable. It is modeled after the standard library's io and net/http packages. This package enforces you to only log key/value pairs. Keys must be strings. Values may be any type that you like. The default output format is logfmt, but you may also choose to use JSON instead if that suits you. Here's how you log: This will output a line that looks like: To get started, you'll want to import the library: Now you're ready to start logging: Because recording a human-meaningful message is common and good practice, the first argument to every logging method is the value to the *implicit* key 'msg'. Additionally, the level you choose for a message will be automatically added with the key 'lvl', and so will the current timestamp with key 't'. You may supply any additional context as a set of key/value pairs to the logging function. log15 allows you to favor terseness, ordering, and speed over safety. This is a reasonable tradeoff for logging functions. You don't need to explicitly state keys/values, log15 understands that they alternate in the variadic argument list: If you really do favor your type-safety, you may choose to pass a log.Ctx instead: Frequently, you want to add context to a logger so that you can track actions associated with it. An http request is a good example. You can easily create new loggers that have context that is automatically included with each log line: This will output a log line that includes the path context that is attached to the logger: The Handler interface defines where log lines are printed to and how they are formated. Handler is a single interface that is inspired by net/http's handler interface: Handlers can filter records, format them, or dispatch to multiple other Handlers. This package implements a number of Handlers for common logging patterns that are easily composed to create flexible, custom logging structures. Here's an example handler that prints logfmt output to Stdout: Here's an example handler that defers to two other handlers. One handler only prints records from the rpc package in logfmt to standard out. The other prints records at Error level or above in JSON formatted output to the file /var/log/service.json This package implements three Handlers that add debugging information to the context, CallerFileHandler, CallerFuncHandler and CallerStackHandler. Here's an example that adds the source file and line number of each logging call to the context. This will output a line that looks like: Here's an example that logs the call stack rather than just the call site. This will output a line that looks like: The "%+v" format instructs the handler to include the path of the source file relative to the compile time GOPATH. The github.com/go-stack/stack package documents the full list of formatting verbs and modifiers available. The Handler interface is so simple that it's also trivial to write your own. Let's create an example handler which tries to write to one handler, but if that fails it falls back to writing to another handler and includes the error that it encountered when trying to write to the primary. This might be useful when trying to log over a network socket, but if that fails you want to log those records to a file on disk. This pattern is so useful that a generic version that handles an arbitrary number of Handlers is included as part of this library called FailoverHandler. Sometimes, you want to log values that are extremely expensive to compute, but you don't want to pay the price of computing them if you haven't turned up your logging level to a high level of detail. This package provides a simple type to annotate a logging operation that you want to be evaluated lazily, just when it is about to be logged, so that it would not be evaluated if an upstream Handler filters it out. Just wrap any function which takes no arguments with the log.Lazy type. For example: If this message is not logged for any reason (like logging at the Error level), then factorRSAKey is never evaluated. The same log.Lazy mechanism can be used to attach context to a logger which you want to be evaluated when the message is logged, but not when the logger is created. For example, let's imagine a game where you have Player objects: You always want to log a player's name and whether they're alive or dead, so when you create the player object, you might do: Only now, even after a player has died, the logger will still report they are alive because the logging context is evaluated when the logger was created. By using the Lazy wrapper, we can defer the evaluation of whether the player is alive or not to each log message, so that the log records will reflect the player's current state no matter when the log message is written: If log15 detects that stdout is a terminal, it will configure the default handler for it (which is log.StdoutHandler) to use TerminalFormat. This format logs records nicely for your terminal, including color-coded output based on log level. Becasuse log15 allows you to step around the type system, there are a few ways you can specify invalid arguments to the logging functions. You could, for example, wrap something that is not a zero-argument function with log.Lazy or pass a context key that is not a string. Since logging libraries are typically the mechanism by which errors are reported, it would be onerous for the logging functions to return errors. Instead, log15 handles errors by making these guarantees to you: - Any log record containing an error will still be printed with the error explained to you as part of the log record. - Any log record containing an error will include the context key LOG15_ERROR, enabling you to easily (and if you like, automatically) detect if any of your logging calls are passing bad values. Understanding this, you might wonder why the Handler interface can return an error value in its Log method. Handlers are encouraged to return errors only if they fail to write their log records out to an external source like if the syslog daemon is not responding. This allows the construction of useful handlers which cope with those failures like the FailoverHandler. log15 is intended to be useful for library authors as a way to provide configurable logging to users of their library. Best practice for use in a library is to always disable all output for your logger by default and to provide a public Logger instance that consumers of your library can configure. Like so: Users of your library may then enable it if they like: The ability to attach context to a logger is a powerful one. Where should you do it and why? I favor embedding a Logger directly into any persistent object in my application and adding unique, tracing context keys to it. For instance, imagine I am writing a web browser: When a new tab is created, I assign a logger to it with the url of the tab as context so it can easily be traced through the logs. Now, whenever we perform any operation with the tab, we'll log with its embedded logger and it will include the tab title automatically: There's only one problem. What if the tab url changes? We could use log.Lazy to make sure the current url is always written, but that would mean that we couldn't trace a tab's full lifetime through our logs after the user navigate to a new URL. Instead, think about what values to attach to your loggers the same way you think about what to use as a key in a SQL database schema. If it's possible to use a natural key that is unique for the lifetime of the object, do so. But otherwise, log15's ext package has a handy RandId function to let you generate what you might call "surrogate keys" They're just random hex identifiers to use for tracing. Back to our Tab example, we would prefer to set up our Logger like so: Now we'll have a unique traceable identifier even across loading new urls, but we'll still be able to see the tab's current url in the log messages. For all Handler functions which can return an error, there is a version of that function which will return no error but panics on failure. They are all available on the Must object. For example: All of the following excellent projects inspired the design of this library: code.google.com/p/log4go github.com/op/go-logging github.com/technoweenie/grohl github.com/Sirupsen/logrus github.com/kr/logfmt github.com/spacemonkeygo/spacelog golang's stdlib, notably io and net/http https://xkcd.com/927/

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. Minimum go version required is 1.5. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package dqrack is a helping wrapper for Dgraph. It provides a load of useful "marshalling" functions to allow lazy work. Pronounced "d-crack"

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. Minimum go version required is 1.5. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. Minimum go version required is 1.5. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. Minimum go version required is 1.5. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package log15 provides an opinionated, simple toolkit for best-practice logging that is both human and machine readable. It is modeled after the standard library's io and net/http packages. This package enforces you to only log key/value pairs. Keys must be strings. Values may be any type that you like. The default output format is logfmt, but you may also choose to use JSON instead if that suits you. Here's how you log: This will output a line that looks like: To get started, you'll want to import the library: Now you're ready to start logging: Because recording a human-meaningful message is common and good practice, the first argument to every logging method is the value to the *implicit* key 'msg'. Additionally, the level you choose for a message will be automatically added with the key 'lvl', and so will the current timestamp with key 't'. You may supply any additional context as a set of key/value pairs to the logging function. log15 allows you to favor terseness, ordering, and speed over safety. This is a reasonable tradeoff for logging functions. You don't need to explicitly state keys/values, log15 understands that they alternate in the variadic argument list: If you really do favor your type-safety, you may choose to pass a log.Ctx instead: Frequently, you want to add context to a logger so that you can track actions associated with it. An http request is a good example. You can easily create new loggers that have context that is automatically included with each log line: This will output a log line that includes the path context that is attached to the logger: The Handler interface defines where log lines are printed to and how they are formated. Handler is a single interface that is inspired by net/http's handler interface: Handlers can filter records, format them, or dispatch to multiple other Handlers. This package implements a number of Handlers for common logging patterns that are easily composed to create flexible, custom logging structures. Here's an example handler that prints logfmt output to Stdout: Here's an example handler that defers to two other handlers. One handler only prints records from the rpc package in logfmt to standard out. The other prints records at Error level or above in JSON formatted output to the file /var/log/service.json This package implements three Handlers that add debugging information to the context, CallerFileHandler, CallerFuncHandler and CallerStackHandler. Here's an example that adds the source file and line number of each logging call to the context. This will output a line that looks like: Here's an example that logs the call stack rather than just the call site. This will output a line that looks like: The "%+v" format instructs the handler to include the path of the source file relative to the compile time GOPATH. The github.com/go-stack/stack package documents the full list of formatting verbs and modifiers available. The Handler interface is so simple that it's also trivial to write your own. Let's create an example handler which tries to write to one handler, but if that fails it falls back to writing to another handler and includes the error that it encountered when trying to write to the primary. This might be useful when trying to log over a network socket, but if that fails you want to log those records to a file on disk. This pattern is so useful that a generic version that handles an arbitrary number of Handlers is included as part of this library called FailoverHandler. Sometimes, you want to log values that are extremely expensive to compute, but you don't want to pay the price of computing them if you haven't turned up your logging level to a high level of detail. This package provides a simple type to annotate a logging operation that you want to be evaluated lazily, just when it is about to be logged, so that it would not be evaluated if an upstream Handler filters it out. Just wrap any function which takes no arguments with the log.Lazy type. For example: If this message is not logged for any reason (like logging at the Error level), then factorRSAKey is never evaluated. The same log.Lazy mechanism can be used to attach context to a logger which you want to be evaluated when the message is logged, but not when the logger is created. For example, let's imagine a game where you have Player objects: You always want to log a player's name and whether they're alive or dead, so when you create the player object, you might do: Only now, even after a player has died, the logger will still report they are alive because the logging context is evaluated when the logger was created. By using the Lazy wrapper, we can defer the evaluation of whether the player is alive or not to each log message, so that the log records will reflect the player's current state no matter when the log message is written: If log15 detects that stdout is a terminal, it will configure the default handler for it (which is log.StdoutHandler) to use TerminalFormat. This format logs records nicely for your terminal, including color-coded output based on log level. Becasuse log15 allows you to step around the type system, there are a few ways you can specify invalid arguments to the logging functions. You could, for example, wrap something that is not a zero-argument function with log.Lazy or pass a context key that is not a string. Since logging libraries are typically the mechanism by which errors are reported, it would be onerous for the logging functions to return errors. Instead, log15 handles errors by making these guarantees to you: - Any log record containing an error will still be printed with the error explained to you as part of the log record. - Any log record containing an error will include the context key LOG15_ERROR, enabling you to easily (and if you like, automatically) detect if any of your logging calls are passing bad values. Understanding this, you might wonder why the Handler interface can return an error value in its Log method. Handlers are encouraged to return errors only if they fail to write their log records out to an external source like if the syslog daemon is not responding. This allows the construction of useful handlers which cope with those failures like the FailoverHandler. log15 is intended to be useful for library authors as a way to provide configurable logging to users of their library. Best practice for use in a library is to always disable all output for your logger by default and to provide a public Logger instance that consumers of your library can configure. Like so: Users of your library may then enable it if they like: The ability to attach context to a logger is a powerful one. Where should you do it and why? I favor embedding a Logger directly into any persistent object in my application and adding unique, tracing context keys to it. For instance, imagine I am writing a web browser: When a new tab is created, I assign a logger to it with the url of the tab as context so it can easily be traced through the logs. Now, whenever we perform any operation with the tab, we'll log with its embedded logger and it will include the tab title automatically: There's only one problem. What if the tab url changes? We could use log.Lazy to make sure the current url is always written, but that would mean that we couldn't trace a tab's full lifetime through our logs after the user navigate to a new URL. Instead, think about what values to attach to your loggers the same way you think about what to use as a key in a SQL database schema. If it's possible to use a natural key that is unique for the lifetime of the object, do so. But otherwise, log15's ext package has a handy RandId function to let you generate what you might call "surrogate keys" They're just random hex identifiers to use for tracing. Back to our Tab example, we would prefer to set up our Logger like so: Now we'll have a unique traceable identifier even across loading new urls, but we'll still be able to see the tab's current url in the log messages. For all Handler functions which can return an error, there is a version of that function which will return no error but panics on failure. They are all available on the Must object. For example: All of the following excellent projects inspired the design of this library: code.google.com/p/log4go github.com/op/go-logging github.com/technoweenie/grohl github.com/Sirupsen/logrus github.com/kr/logfmt github.com/spacemonkeygo/spacelog golang's stdlib, notably io and net/http https://xkcd.com/927/

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. Minimum go version required is 1.5. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. Minimum go version required is 1.5. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. Minimum go version required is 1.5. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package log15 provides an opinionated, simple toolkit for best-practice logging that is both human and machine readable. It is modeled after the standard library's io and net/http packages. This package enforces you to only log key/value pairs. Keys must be strings. Values may be any type that you like. The default output format is logfmt, but you may also choose to use JSON instead if that suits you. Here's how you log: This will output a line that looks like: To get started, you'll want to import the library: Now you're ready to start logging: Because recording a human-meaningful message is common and good practice, the first argument to every logging method is the value to the *implicit* key 'msg'. Additionally, the level you choose for a message will be automatically added with the key 'lvl', and so will the current timestamp with key 't'. You may supply any additional context as a set of key/value pairs to the logging function. log15 allows you to favor terseness, ordering, and speed over safety. This is a reasonable tradeoff for logging functions. You don't need to explicitly state keys/values, log15 understands that they alternate in the variadic argument list: If you really do favor your type-safety, you may choose to pass a log.Ctx instead: Frequently, you want to add context to a logger so that you can track actions associated with it. An http request is a good example. You can easily create new loggers that have context that is automatically included with each log line: This will output a log line that includes the path context that is attached to the logger: The Handler interface defines where log lines are printed to and how they are formated. Handler is a single interface that is inspired by net/http's handler interface: Handlers can filter records, format them, or dispatch to multiple other Handlers. This package implements a number of Handlers for common logging patterns that are easily composed to create flexible, custom logging structures. Here's an example handler that prints logfmt output to Stdout: Here's an example handler that defers to two other handlers. One handler only prints records from the rpc package in logfmt to standard out. The other prints records at Error level or above in JSON formatted output to the file /var/log/service.json This package implements three Handlers that add debugging information to the context, CallerFileHandler, CallerFuncHandler and CallerStackHandler. Here's an example that adds the source file and line number of each logging call to the context. This will output a line that looks like: Here's an example that logs the call stack rather than just the call site. This will output a line that looks like: The "%+v" format instructs the handler to include the path of the source file relative to the compile time GOPATH. The github.com/go-stack/stack package documents the full list of formatting verbs and modifiers available. The Handler interface is so simple that it's also trivial to write your own. Let's create an example handler which tries to write to one handler, but if that fails it falls back to writing to another handler and includes the error that it encountered when trying to write to the primary. This might be useful when trying to log over a network socket, but if that fails you want to log those records to a file on disk. This pattern is so useful that a generic version that handles an arbitrary number of Handlers is included as part of this library called FailoverHandler. Sometimes, you want to log values that are extremely expensive to compute, but you don't want to pay the price of computing them if you haven't turned up your logging level to a high level of detail. This package provides a simple type to annotate a logging operation that you want to be evaluated lazily, just when it is about to be logged, so that it would not be evaluated if an upstream Handler filters it out. Just wrap any function which takes no arguments with the log.Lazy type. For example: If this message is not logged for any reason (like logging at the Error level), then factorRSAKey is never evaluated. The same log.Lazy mechanism can be used to attach context to a logger which you want to be evaluated when the message is logged, but not when the logger is created. For example, let's imagine a game where you have Player objects: You always want to log a player's name and whether they're alive or dead, so when you create the player object, you might do: Only now, even after a player has died, the logger will still report they are alive because the logging context is evaluated when the logger was created. By using the Lazy wrapper, we can defer the evaluation of whether the player is alive or not to each log message, so that the log records will reflect the player's current state no matter when the log message is written: If log15 detects that stdout is a terminal, it will configure the default handler for it (which is log.StdoutHandler) to use TerminalFormat. This format logs records nicely for your terminal, including color-coded output based on log level. Becasuse log15 allows you to step around the type system, there are a few ways you can specify invalid arguments to the logging functions. You could, for example, wrap something that is not a zero-argument function with log.Lazy or pass a context key that is not a string. Since logging libraries are typically the mechanism by which errors are reported, it would be onerous for the logging functions to return errors. Instead, log15 handles errors by making these guarantees to you: - Any log record containing an error will still be printed with the error explained to you as part of the log record. - Any log record containing an error will include the context key LOG15_ERROR, enabling you to easily (and if you like, automatically) detect if any of your logging calls are passing bad values. Understanding this, you might wonder why the Handler interface can return an error value in its Log method. Handlers are encouraged to return errors only if they fail to write their log records out to an external source like if the syslog daemon is not responding. This allows the construction of useful handlers which cope with those failures like the FailoverHandler. log15 is intended to be useful for library authors as a way to provide configurable logging to users of their library. Best practice for use in a library is to always disable all output for your logger by default and to provide a public Logger instance that consumers of your library can configure. Like so: Users of your library may then enable it if they like: The ability to attach context to a logger is a powerful one. Where should you do it and why? I favor embedding a Logger directly into any persistent object in my application and adding unique, tracing context keys to it. For instance, imagine I am writing a web browser: When a new tab is created, I assign a logger to it with the url of the tab as context so it can easily be traced through the logs. Now, whenever we perform any operation with the tab, we'll log with its embedded logger and it will include the tab title automatically: There's only one problem. What if the tab url changes? We could use log.Lazy to make sure the current url is always written, but that would mean that we couldn't trace a tab's full lifetime through our logs after the user navigate to a new URL. Instead, think about what values to attach to your loggers the same way you think about what to use as a key in a SQL database schema. If it's possible to use a natural key that is unique for the lifetime of the object, do so. But otherwise, log15's ext package has a handy RandId function to let you generate what you might call "surrogate keys" They're just random hex identifiers to use for tracing. Back to our Tab example, we would prefer to set up our Logger like so: Now we'll have a unique traceable identifier even across loading new urls, but we'll still be able to see the tab's current url in the log messages. For all Handler functions which can return an error, there is a version of that function which will return no error but panics on failure. They are all available on the Must object. For example: All of the following excellent projects inspired the design of this library: code.google.com/p/log4go github.com/op/go-logging github.com/technoweenie/grohl github.com/Sirupsen/logrus github.com/kr/logfmt github.com/spacemonkeygo/spacelog golang's stdlib, notably io and net/http https://xkcd.com/927/

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. Minimum go version required is 1.5. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. Minimum go version required is 1.5. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. Minimum go version required is 1.5. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. Minimum go version required is 1.5. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. Minimum go version required is 1.5. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. Minimum go version required is 1.5. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. Minimum go version required is 1.5. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package log15 provides an opinionated, simple toolkit for best-practice logging that is both human and machine readable. It is modeled after the standard library's io and net/http packages. This package enforces you to only log key/value pairs. Keys must be strings. Values may be any type that you like. The default output format is logfmt, but you may also choose to use JSON instead if that suits you. Here's how you log: This will output a line that looks like: To get started, you'll want to import the library: Now you're ready to start logging: Because recording a human-meaningful message is common and good practice, the first argument to every logging method is the value to the *implicit* key 'msg'. Additionally, the level you choose for a message will be automatically added with the key 'lvl', and so will the current timestamp with key 't'. You may supply any additional context as a set of key/value pairs to the logging function. log15 allows you to favor terseness, ordering, and speed over safety. This is a reasonable tradeoff for logging functions. You don't need to explicitly state keys/values, log15 understands that they alternate in the variadic argument list: If you really do favor your type-safety, you may choose to pass a log.Ctx instead: Frequently, you want to add context to a logger so that you can track actions associated with it. An http request is a good example. You can easily create new loggers that have context that is automatically included with each log line: This will output a log line that includes the path context that is attached to the logger: The Handler interface defines where log lines are printed to and how they are formated. Handler is a single interface that is inspired by net/http's handler interface: Handlers can filter records, format them, or dispatch to multiple other Handlers. This package implements a number of Handlers for common logging patterns that are easily composed to create flexible, custom logging structures. Here's an example handler that prints logfmt output to Stdout: Here's an example handler that defers to two other handlers. One handler only prints records from the rpc package in logfmt to standard out. The other prints records at Error level or above in JSON formatted output to the file /var/log/service.json This package implements three Handlers that add debugging information to the context, CallerFileHandler, CallerFuncHandler and CallerStackHandler. Here's an example that adds the source file and line number of each logging call to the context. This will output a line that looks like: Here's an example that logs the call stack rather than just the call site. This will output a line that looks like: The "%+v" format instructs the handler to include the path of the source file relative to the compile time GOPATH. The github.com/go-stack/stack package documents the full list of formatting verbs and modifiers available. The Handler interface is so simple that it's also trivial to write your own. Let's create an example handler which tries to write to one handler, but if that fails it falls back to writing to another handler and includes the error that it encountered when trying to write to the primary. This might be useful when trying to log over a network socket, but if that fails you want to log those records to a file on disk. This pattern is so useful that a generic version that handles an arbitrary number of Handlers is included as part of this library called FailoverHandler. Sometimes, you want to log values that are extremely expensive to compute, but you don't want to pay the price of computing them if you haven't turned up your logging level to a high level of detail. This package provides a simple type to annotate a logging operation that you want to be evaluated lazily, just when it is about to be logged, so that it would not be evaluated if an upstream Handler filters it out. Just wrap any function which takes no arguments with the log.Lazy type. For example: If this message is not logged for any reason (like logging at the Error level), then factorRSAKey is never evaluated. The same log.Lazy mechanism can be used to attach context to a logger which you want to be evaluated when the message is logged, but not when the logger is created. For example, let's imagine a game where you have Player objects: You always want to log a player's name and whether they're alive or dead, so when you create the player object, you might do: Only now, even after a player has died, the logger will still report they are alive because the logging context is evaluated when the logger was created. By using the Lazy wrapper, we can defer the evaluation of whether the player is alive or not to each log message, so that the log records will reflect the player's current state no matter when the log message is written: If log15 detects that stdout is a terminal, it will configure the default handler for it (which is log.StdoutHandler) to use TerminalFormat. This format logs records nicely for your terminal, including color-coded output based on log level. Becasuse log15 allows you to step around the type system, there are a few ways you can specify invalid arguments to the logging functions. You could, for example, wrap something that is not a zero-argument function with log.Lazy or pass a context key that is not a string. Since logging libraries are typically the mechanism by which errors are reported, it would be onerous for the logging functions to return errors. Instead, log15 handles errors by making these guarantees to you: - Any log record containing an error will still be printed with the error explained to you as part of the log record. - Any log record containing an error will include the context key LOG15_ERROR, enabling you to easily (and if you like, automatically) detect if any of your logging calls are passing bad values. Understanding this, you might wonder why the Handler interface can return an error value in its Log method. Handlers are encouraged to return errors only if they fail to write their log records out to an external source like if the syslog daemon is not responding. This allows the construction of useful handlers which cope with those failures like the FailoverHandler. log15 is intended to be useful for library authors as a way to provide configurable logging to users of their library. Best practice for use in a library is to always disable all output for your logger by default and to provide a public Logger instance that consumers of your library can configure. Like so: Users of your library may then enable it if they like: The ability to attach context to a logger is a powerful one. Where should you do it and why? I favor embedding a Logger directly into any persistent object in my application and adding unique, tracing context keys to it. For instance, imagine I am writing a web browser: When a new tab is created, I assign a logger to it with the url of the tab as context so it can easily be traced through the logs. Now, whenever we perform any operation with the tab, we'll log with its embedded logger and it will include the tab title automatically: There's only one problem. What if the tab url changes? We could use log.Lazy to make sure the current url is always written, but that would mean that we couldn't trace a tab's full lifetime through our logs after the user navigate to a new URL. Instead, think about what values to attach to your loggers the same way you think about what to use as a key in a SQL database schema. If it's possible to use a natural key that is unique for the lifetime of the object, do so. But otherwise, log15's ext package has a handy RandId function to let you generate what you might call "surrogate keys" They're just random hex identifiers to use for tracing. Back to our Tab example, we would prefer to set up our Logger like so: Now we'll have a unique traceable identifier even across loading new urls, but we'll still be able to see the tab's current url in the log messages. For all Handler functions which can return an error, there is a version of that function which will return no error but panics on failure. They are all available on the Must object. For example: All of the following excellent projects inspired the design of this library: code.google.com/p/log4go github.com/op/go-logging github.com/technoweenie/grohl github.com/Sirupsen/logrus github.com/kr/logfmt github.com/spacemonkeygo/spacelog golang's stdlib, notably io and net/http https://xkcd.com/927/

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. Minimum go version required is 1.5. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. Minimum go version required is 1.5. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. Minimum go version required is 1.5. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package log15 provides an opinionated, simple toolkit for best-practice logging that is both human and machine readable. It is modeled after the standard library's io and net/http packages. This package enforces you to only log key/value pairs. Keys must be strings. Values may be any type that you like. The default output format is logfmt, but you may also choose to use JSON instead if that suits you. Here's how you log: This will output a line that looks like: To get started, you'll want to import the library: Now you're ready to start logging: Because recording a human-meaningful message is common and good practice, the first argument to every logging method is the value to the *implicit* key 'msg'. Additionally, the level you choose for a message will be automatically added with the key 'lvl', and so will the current timestamp with key 't'. You may supply any additional context as a set of key/value pairs to the logging function. log15 allows you to favor terseness, ordering, and speed over safety. This is a reasonable tradeoff for logging functions. You don't need to explicitly state keys/values, log15 understands that they alternate in the variadic argument list: If you really do favor your type-safety, you may choose to pass a log.Ctx instead: Frequently, you want to add context to a logger so that you can track actions associated with it. An http request is a good example. You can easily create new loggers that have context that is automatically included with each log line: This will output a log line that includes the path context that is attached to the logger: The Handler interface defines where log lines are printed to and how they are formated. Handler is a single interface that is inspired by net/http's handler interface: Handlers can filter records, format them, or dispatch to multiple other Handlers. This package implements a number of Handlers for common logging patterns that are easily composed to create flexible, custom logging structures. Here's an example handler that prints logfmt output to Stdout: Here's an example handler that defers to two other handlers. One handler only prints records from the rpc package in logfmt to standard out. The other prints records at Error level or above in JSON formatted output to the file /var/log/service.json This package implements three Handlers that add debugging information to the context, CallerFileHandler, CallerFuncHandler and CallerStackHandler. Here's an example that adds the source file and line number of each logging call to the context. This will output a line that looks like: Here's an example that logs the call stack rather than just the call site. This will output a line that looks like: The "%+v" format instructs the handler to include the path of the source file relative to the compile time GOPATH. The github.com/go-stack/stack package documents the full list of formatting verbs and modifiers available. The Handler interface is so simple that it's also trivial to write your own. Let's create an example handler which tries to write to one handler, but if that fails it falls back to writing to another handler and includes the error that it encountered when trying to write to the primary. This might be useful when trying to log over a network socket, but if that fails you want to log those records to a file on disk. This pattern is so useful that a generic version that handles an arbitrary number of Handlers is included as part of this library called FailoverHandler. Sometimes, you want to log values that are extremely expensive to compute, but you don't want to pay the price of computing them if you haven't turned up your logging level to a high level of detail. This package provides a simple type to annotate a logging operation that you want to be evaluated lazily, just when it is about to be logged, so that it would not be evaluated if an upstream Handler filters it out. Just wrap any function which takes no arguments with the log.Lazy type. For example: If this message is not logged for any reason (like logging at the Error level), then factorRSAKey is never evaluated. The same log.Lazy mechanism can be used to attach context to a logger which you want to be evaluated when the message is logged, but not when the logger is created. For example, let's imagine a game where you have Player objects: You always want to log a player's name and whether they're alive or dead, so when you create the player object, you might do: Only now, even after a player has died, the logger will still report they are alive because the logging context is evaluated when the logger was created. By using the Lazy wrapper, we can defer the evaluation of whether the player is alive or not to each log message, so that the log records will reflect the player's current state no matter when the log message is written: If log15 detects that stdout is a terminal, it will configure the default handler for it (which is log.StdoutHandler) to use TerminalFormat. This format logs records nicely for your terminal, including color-coded output based on log level. Becasuse log15 allows you to step around the type system, there are a few ways you can specify invalid arguments to the logging functions. You could, for example, wrap something that is not a zero-argument function with log.Lazy or pass a context key that is not a string. Since logging libraries are typically the mechanism by which errors are reported, it would be onerous for the logging functions to return errors. Instead, log15 handles errors by making these guarantees to you: - Any log record containing an error will still be printed with the error explained to you as part of the log record. - Any log record containing an error will include the context key LOG15_ERROR, enabling you to easily (and if you like, automatically) detect if any of your logging calls are passing bad values. Understanding this, you might wonder why the Handler interface can return an error value in its Log method. Handlers are encouraged to return errors only if they fail to write their log records out to an external source like if the syslog daemon is not responding. This allows the construction of useful handlers which cope with those failures like the FailoverHandler. log15 is intended to be useful for library authors as a way to provide configurable logging to users of their library. Best practice for use in a library is to always disable all output for your logger by default and to provide a public Logger instance that consumers of your library can configure. Like so: Users of your library may then enable it if they like: The ability to attach context to a logger is a powerful one. Where should you do it and why? I favor embedding a Logger directly into any persistent object in my application and adding unique, tracing context keys to it. For instance, imagine I am writing a web browser: When a new tab is created, I assign a logger to it with the url of the tab as context so it can easily be traced through the logs. Now, whenever we perform any operation with the tab, we'll log with its embedded logger and it will include the tab title automatically: There's only one problem. What if the tab url changes? We could use log.Lazy to make sure the current url is always written, but that would mean that we couldn't trace a tab's full lifetime through our logs after the user navigate to a new URL. Instead, think about what values to attach to your loggers the same way you think about what to use as a key in a SQL database schema. If it's possible to use a natural key that is unique for the lifetime of the object, do so. But otherwise, log15's ext package has a handy RandId function to let you generate what you might call "surrogate keys" They're just random hex identifiers to use for tracing. Back to our Tab example, we would prefer to set up our Logger like so: Now we'll have a unique traceable identifier even across loading new urls, but we'll still be able to see the tab's current url in the log messages. For all Handler functions which can return an error, there is a version of that function which will return no error but panics on failure. They are all available on the Must object. For example: All of the following excellent projects inspired the design of this library: code.google.com/p/log4go github.com/op/go-logging github.com/technoweenie/grohl github.com/Sirupsen/logrus github.com/kr/logfmt github.com/spacemonkeygo/spacelog golang's stdlib, notably io and net/http https://xkcd.com/927/

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. Minimum go version required is 1.5. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. Minimum go version required is 1.5. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. Minimum go version required is 1.5. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. Minimum go version required is 1.5 except for pcapgo/EthernetHandle, afpacket, and bsdbpf which need at least 1.7 due to x/sys/unix dependencies. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. By default, DecodingLayerParser uses native map to store and search for a layer to decode. Though being versatile, in some cases this solution may be not so optimal. For example, if you have only few layers faster operations may be provided by sparse array indexing or linear array scan. To accomodate these scenarios, DecodingLayerContainer interface is introduced along with its implementations: DecodingLayerSparse, DecodingLayerArray and DecodingLayerMap. You can specify a container implementation to DecodingLayerParser with SetDecodingLayerContainer method. Example: To skip one level of indirection (though sacrificing some capabilities) you may also use DecodingLayerContainer as a decoding tool as it is. In this case you have to handle unknown layer types and layer panics by yourself. Example: DecodingLayerSparse is the fastest but most effective when LayerType values that layers in use can decode are not large because otherwise that would lead to bigger memory footprint. DecodingLayerArray is very compact and primarily usable if the number of decoding layers is not big (up to ~10-15, but please do your own benchmarks). DecodingLayerMap is the most versatile one and used by DecodingLayerParser by default. Please refer to tests and benchmarks in layers subpackage to further examine usage examples and performance measurements. You may also choose to implement your own DecodingLayerContainer if you want to make use of your own internal packet decoding logic. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. Minimum go version required is 1.5. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with:

Package gopacket provides packet decoding for the Go language. gopacket contains many sub-packages with additional functionality you may find useful, including: Also, if you're looking to dive right into code, see the examples subdirectory for numerous simple binaries built using gopacket libraries. Minimum go version required is 1.5. gopacket takes in packet data as a []byte and decodes it into a packet with a non-zero number of "layers". Each layer corresponds to a protocol within the bytes. Once a packet has been decoded, the layers of the packet can be requested from the packet. Packets can be decoded from a number of starting points. Many of our base types implement Decoder, which allow us to decode packets for which we don't have full data. Most of the time, you won't just have a []byte of packet data lying around. Instead, you'll want to read packets in from somewhere (file, interface, etc) and process them. To do that, you'll want to build a PacketSource. First, you'll need to construct an object that implements the PacketDataSource interface. There are implementations of this interface bundled with gopacket in the gopacket/pcap and gopacket/pfring subpackages... see their documentation for more information on their usage. Once you have a PacketDataSource, you can pass it into NewPacketSource, along with a Decoder of your choice, to create a PacketSource. Once you have a PacketSource, you can read packets from it in multiple ways. See the docs for PacketSource for more details. The easiest method is the Packets function, which returns a channel, then asynchronously writes new packets into that channel, closing the channel if the packetSource hits an end-of-file. You can change the decoding options of the packetSource by setting fields in packetSource.DecodeOptions... see the following sections for more details. gopacket optionally decodes packet data lazily, meaning it only decodes a packet layer when it needs to handle a function call. Lazily-decoded packets are not concurrency-safe. Since layers have not all been decoded, each call to Layer() or Layers() has the potential to mutate the packet in order to decode the next layer. If a packet is used in multiple goroutines concurrently, don't use gopacket.Lazy. Then gopacket will decode the packet fully, and all future function calls won't mutate the object. By default, gopacket will copy the slice passed to NewPacket and store the copy within the packet, so future mutations to the bytes underlying the slice don't affect the packet and its layers. If you can guarantee that the underlying slice bytes won't be changed, you can use NoCopy to tell gopacket.NewPacket, and it'll use the passed-in slice itself. The fastest method of decoding is to use both Lazy and NoCopy, but note from the many caveats above that for some implementations either or both may be dangerous. During decoding, certain layers are stored in the packet as well-known layer types. For example, IPv4 and IPv6 are both considered NetworkLayer layers, while TCP and UDP are both TransportLayer layers. We support 4 layers, corresponding to the 4 layers of the TCP/IP layering scheme (roughly anagalous to layers 2, 3, 4, and 7 of the OSI model). To access these, you can use the packet.LinkLayer, packet.NetworkLayer, packet.TransportLayer, and packet.ApplicationLayer functions. Each of these functions returns a corresponding interface (gopacket.{Link,Network,Transport,Application}Layer). The first three provide methods for getting src/dst addresses for that particular layer, while the final layer provides a Payload function to get payload data. This is helpful, for example, to get payloads for all packets regardless of their underlying data type: A particularly useful layer is ErrorLayer, which is set whenever there's an error parsing part of the packet. Note that we don't return an error from NewPacket because we may have decoded a number of layers successfully before running into our erroneous layer. You may still be able to get your Ethernet and IPv4 layers correctly, even if your TCP layer is malformed. gopacket has two useful objects, Flow and Endpoint, for communicating in a protocol independent manner the fact that a packet is coming from A and going to B. The general layer types LinkLayer, NetworkLayer, and TransportLayer all provide methods for extracting their flow information, without worrying about the type of the underlying Layer. A Flow is a simple object made up of a set of two Endpoints, one source and one destination. It details the sender and receiver of the Layer of the Packet. An Endpoint is a hashable representation of a source or destination. For example, for LayerTypeIPv4, an Endpoint contains the IP address bytes for a v4 IP packet. A Flow can be broken into Endpoints, and Endpoints can be combined into Flows: Both Endpoint and Flow objects can be used as map keys, and the equality operator can compare them, so you can easily group together all packets based on endpoint criteria: For load-balancing purposes, both Flow and Endpoint have FastHash() functions, which provide quick, non-cryptographic hashes of their contents. Of particular importance is the fact that Flow FastHash() is symmetric: A->B will have the same hash as B->A. An example usage could be: This allows us to split up a packet stream while still making sure that each stream sees all packets for a flow (and its bidirectional opposite). If your network has some strange encapsulation, you can implement your own decoder. In this example, we handle Ethernet packets which are encapsulated in a 4-byte header. See the docs for Decoder and PacketBuilder for more details on how coding decoders works, or look at RegisterLayerType and RegisterEndpointType to see how to add layer/endpoint types to gopacket. TLDR: DecodingLayerParser takes about 10% of the time as NewPacket to decode packet data, but only for known packet stacks. Basic decoding using gopacket.NewPacket or PacketSource.Packets is somewhat slow due to its need to allocate a new packet and every respective layer. It's very versatile and can handle all known layer types, but sometimes you really only care about a specific set of layers regardless, so that versatility is wasted. DecodingLayerParser avoids memory allocation altogether by decoding packet layers directly into preallocated objects, which you can then reference to get the packet's information. A quick example: The important thing to note here is that the parser is modifying the passed in layers (eth, ip4, ip6, tcp) instead of allocating new ones, thus greatly speeding up the decoding process. It's even branching based on layer type... it'll handle an (eth, ip4, tcp) or (eth, ip6, tcp) stack. However, it won't handle any other type... since no other decoders were passed in, an (eth, ip4, udp) stack will stop decoding after ip4, and only pass back [LayerTypeEthernet, LayerTypeIPv4] through the 'decoded' slice (along with an error saying it can't decode a UDP packet). Unfortunately, not all layers can be used by DecodingLayerParser... only those implementing the DecodingLayer interface are usable. Also, it's possible to create DecodingLayers that are not themselves Layers... see layers.IPv6ExtensionSkipper for an example of this. As well as offering the ability to decode packet data, gopacket will allow you to create packets from scratch, as well. A number of gopacket layers implement the SerializableLayer interface; these layers can be serialized to a []byte in the following manner: SerializeTo PREPENDS the given layer onto the SerializeBuffer, and they treat the current buffer's Bytes() slice as the payload of the serializing layer. Therefore, you can serialize an entire packet by serializing a set of layers in reverse order (Payload, then TCP, then IP, then Ethernet, for example). The SerializeBuffer's SerializeLayers function is a helper that does exactly that. To generate a (empty and useless, because no fields are set) Ethernet(IPv4(TCP(Payload))) packet, for example, you can run: If you use gopacket, you'll almost definitely want to make sure gopacket/layers is imported, since when imported it sets all the LayerType variables and fills in a lot of interesting variables/maps (DecodersByLayerName, etc). Therefore, it's recommended that even if you don't use any layers functions directly, you still import with: