The old urls, while prettier and direct, are blocked in some countries. This not only allows us to serve faster downloads to our users more cheaply, but also reach the countries that block GCS.

I’m not sure how much of the internal guts I’m able to share publically as to why Goog’s edge cache behaves the way that it does, but I’ve asked.

In the meantime, curl -O -L https://redirector.gvt1.com/edgedl/go/go1.9.2.linux-armv6l.tar.gz

Noted elsewhere, I see Chrome uses https://dl.google.com/* URLs directly. What is different between Go and Chrome, that Chrome gets to use pretty & non-redirecting URLs?

• These downloads are backed by GCS. We never stopped using it. You can access the payload in a few ways:
  • https://storage.googleapis.com/golang/go1.9.2.linux-armv6l.tar.gz
  • https://dl.google.com/edgedl/go/go1.9.2.linux-armv6l.tar.gz
  • https://dl.google.com/go/go1.9.2.linux-armv6l.tar.gz
  • https://redirector.gvt1.com/edgedl/go/go1.9.2.linux-armv6l.tar.gz
• We picked the last one because 1) it is cheaper and more reliable and 2) the download URLs we choose must be available to our users in countries that may block certain domains.

storage.googleapis.com is definitely blocked.

We can use dl.google.com. It's not blocked, but when I asked about this I was told that it costs more money and is less reliable.

Let's switch to dl.google.com. If it's good enough for Chrome, it's good enough for us.

OK. Sounds good.

Change https://golang.org/cl/76971 mentions this issue: godoc: use dl.google.com instead of redirector.gvt1.com

We used to have really nice download links that just worked.

@bradfitz, what I've always used (for the last 4-6~ major releases) was:

curl -L https://golang.org/dl/go1.9.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz

I thought that was the "canonical nice download link". Is it not the canonical nice link, or were you not aware that it exists?

For reference, it currently redirects to https://redirector.gvt1.com/edgedl/...:

$ curl -i https://golang.org/dl/go1.9.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz
HTTP/2 302 
location: https://redirector.gvt1.com/edgedl/go/go1.9.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz
...

I guess this a question/comment... I want to find out if other people are aware of the https://golang.org/dl/... links and what is their status (canonical? secondary? deprecated?). Thanks.

Looking at golang/tools@9c477ba more closely, I see that what's been modified is the redirect URL that https://golang.org/dl/... returns (and I see that change isn't live yet).

So, before that commit, it was:

nice golang.org/dl URL -> ugly https://redirector.gvt1.com/edgedl/... URL

And after:

nice golang.org/dl URL -> nice https://dl.google.com/go/... URL

(Arrow represents an HTTP redirect.)

I guess that partially answers my question, but my followup question then is, have you considered using curl -L https://golang.org/dl/... and not caring what the underlying redirect URL it uses under the hood? (If the answer is "yes I've considered it", that's completely fine; I just want to confirm.)

@shurcooL, I don't want people to see URLs with "redirector.gvt1.com" in them for hostnames. That says neither Google nor Golang in it and looks spammy.

@bradfitz Makes sense. Thanks for confirming!