How to set timeout for http.Get() requests in Golang?

I'm making a URL fetcher in Go and have a list of URLs to fetch. I send http.Get() requests to each URL and obtain their response.

resp,fetch_err := http.Get(url)

How can I set a custom timeout for each Get request? (The default time is very long and that makes my fetcher really slow.) I want my fetcher to have a timeout of around 40-45 seconds after which it should return "request timed out" and move on to the next URL.

How can I achieve this?

Apparently in Go 1.3 http.Client has Timeout field

client := http.Client{
    Timeout: 5 * time.Second,
}
client.Get(url)

That's done the trick for me.

You need to set up your own Client with your own Transport which uses a custom Dial function which wraps around DialTimeout.

Something like (completely untested) this:

var timeout = time.Duration(2 * time.Second)

func dialTimeout(network, addr string) (net.Conn, error) {
    return net.DialTimeout(network, addr, timeout)
}

func main() {
    transport := http.Transport{
        Dial: dialTimeout,
    }

    client := http.Client{
        Transport: &transport,
    }

    resp, err := client.Get("http://some.url")
}