Understanding goroutines for web API

Just starting out with Go and hoping to create a simple Web API. I'm looking into using Gorilla mux (http://www.gorillatoolkit.org/pkg/mux) to handle web requests.

I'm not sure how to best use Go's concurrency options to handle the requests. Did I read somewhere that the main function is actually a goroutine or should I dispatch each request to a goroutine as they are received? Apologies if I'm "way off".

Assuming you're using the Go's http.ListenAndServe to serve your http requests, the documentation clearly states that each incoming connection is handled by a separate goroutine for you. http://golang.org/pkg/net/http/#Server.Serve
You would usually call ListenAndServe from your main function.

Gorilla mux is simply a package for more flexible routing of requests to your handlers than the http.DefaultServeMux. It doesn't actually handle the incoming connection or request just simply relays it to your handler.

I highly suggest you read a bit of the documentation, specifically this guide https://golang.org/doc/articles/wiki/#tmp_3 on writing web applications.

I'm providing an answer even though I voted to close for being too broad.

Anyway, none of that is really necessary. You're over thinking it. If you haven't read this it looks like a decent tutorial; http://thenewstack.io/make-a-restful-json-api-go/

You can really just set up routes like you would with most typical rest frameworks and let the webserver/framework worry about concurrency at the request handling level. You would only employ goroutines to generate the response of a request, say if you needed to aggregate data from 10 files that are all in a folder. Contrived example, but this is where you would spin off 1 goroutine per file, aggregate all the information by reading off a channel in a non-blocking select and then return the result. You can expect all points of entry to your code are called in an asynchronous, non-blocking fashion if that makes sense...