Reconnect TCP on EOF in Go

I have the following:

    //In an init func
    if logStashHost != "" {
		lsconn, err = net.Dial("tcp", logStashHost)
	}
    ...
    ToLogStash(rec, lsconn)

Then Two functions:

func ReadLogStash(conn net.Conn) {
	buffer := make([]byte, 256)
	for {
		_, err := conn.Read(buffer)
		if err != nil {
			fmt.Println(err)
		} else {
			fmt.Println(buffer)
		}
	}
}

func ToLogStash(r *logrow.Record, conn net.Conn) {
	b, err := json.Marshal(r)
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Println(err)
		return
	}
	_, err = fmt.Fprintln(conn, string(b))
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Println(err)
	}
}

Where ReadLogStash is a running goroutine. If the other side closes, I get EOF. What would be a good implementation in ReadLogStash to have it attempt to reestablish the connection every X seconds when it gets an EOF?

Go has channels for synchronization and communication, use them!

Make your connection in a loop, and have it wait for some sort of message to come back on a channel.

...
errCh := make(chan error)
for {
	lsconn, err = net.Dial("tcp", logStashHost)
	// check error!
	go ReadLogStash(lsconn, errCh)
	err = <-errCh
	if err != nil {
		// bad error
		break
	}
	// sleep to backoff on retries?
}
...

func ReadLogStash(conn net.Conn, errCh chan error) {
	_, err := io.Copy(os.Stderr, conn)
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Println(err)
	}
	// a nil error from io.Copy means you reached EOF.
	errCh <- err
}

Unless you have more functionality in ReadLogStash, you can probably just use io.Copy inline, and forget the entire function, but this pattern may come in useful for you anyway.

Here is what I ended up going with, a channel was the right direction:

if logStashHost != "" {
	lsc = make(chan *logrow.Record)
	go ToLogStash(lsc, logStashHost)
}
...
if lsc != nil {
   lsc <- rec
}
...
func ToLogStash(c chan *logrow.Record, logStashHost string) {
	var lsconn net.Conn
	var enc *json.Encoder
	var err error
	connect := func() {
		for {
			lsconn, err = net.Dial("tcp", logStashHost)
			if err == nil {
				enc = json.NewEncoder(lsconn)
				break
			}
			log.Println(err)
			time.Sleep(time.Second)
		}
	}
	connect()
	for r := range c {
		err = enc.Encode(r)
		if err != nil {
			lsconn.Close()
			log.Println(err)
			connect()
		}
	}
}