Defining REST APIs and routes

While writing RESTful APIs, it's very common to authenticate the user before allowing them to access it. A prerequisite to authenticating the user is to create the API routes, which we will be covering in this recipe.

How to do it...

1. Install the github.com/gorilla/mux and github.com/gorilla/handlers packages using the go get command, as follows:

$ go get github.com/gorilla/mux
$ go get github.com/gorilla/handlers

2. Create http-rest-api.go, where we will define three routes—/status, /get-token and /employees—along with their handlers, as follows:

package main
import 
(
  "encoding/json"
  "log"
  "net/http"
  "os"
  "github.com/gorilla/handlers...