Chose this approach versus detection before even attempting to connect because of potential difficulties to accurately detect that the route's url is going to connect to the server's route listen port. For instance, the server could listen to "0.0.0.0:5222" and the route url be "192.168.1.1:5222". This would create a cycle and may not be that easy to detect before hand. Also, there were some other issues specific to the server running with docker.

Note about code coverage reduction: it seems that we don't include all packages during the test. For instance, new code added in route.go, which is package server. The test testing this feature is in test/routes_test.go, which is package test. So the result in coveralls look like the code is not tested, while it is. Running this command shows that the code is executed as expected: go test -v -covermode=atomic -coverprofile=acc.out -coverpkg=github.com/nats-io/gnatsd/server -run=TestRouteToSelf ./test/