What does it do?

webgocat is a WebSocket client for the command line. It lets you connect to a WebSocket to send and receive text messages. Check out the single file of code.

Why?

I love the tool wscat and have used it for a long time, but I work on machines that don't have Node/NPM installed. Because wscat is installed via NPM and run on Node, it isn't an option for those projects.

I tried using websocat, but the binaries don't come with SSL built in so I couldn't connect to wss endpoints. One could probably add SSL when compiling from the source, but that seemed onerous.

Go lets you compile a binary for almost any target, so I thought that use Go would be a great tool to make a WebSocket client without requiring any other dependencies on the host.