Web Development With Assembly

Building and Running

Only dependencies are x86-64 linux kernel, nasm, and gcc.

To build the server: make server

To run: strace -f ./minserv (I wouldn't run it without strace tbh)

Cleanup (remove intermediary files, tests binary, etc): make clean

Testing

Automated tests can be run using make tests. This will build a separate tests binary that tests the server code. Here's some sample output:

$ make tests
nasm -felf64 tests.s -o tests.o
gcc tests.o -nostartfiles -static -o tests
./tests
strlen_poop     test failed
strlen_empty    test passed
strcmp_equal    test passed
some tests failed! :(
make: *** [tests] Error 1

The exit code for all tests passing will be zero. Tests are located in tests.s.

Manual testing can be done using curl, for exampe:

curl -v localhost:8789/hello_world.txt
curl -v localhost:8789/z/hello_world

Serving Content

Serving static content is as simple as dropping a file or directory in the same directory as the compiled binary. Dynamic content needs to be in the z/ subdirectory and should have the +x bit set. Any executable or script with the proper shebang line will work fine. Dynamic scripts are responsible for setting their own headers.

Warnings

It's bad code. This code is like it was written by a babby who only just learned about global variables and doesn't know how to comment code, mixed in with shellcode.
Bugs. Some of which might kill you. There's very little error checking right now.

To Do

Tests
Handle syscall error cases
Support for apps written in assembly (loading it instead of just execve'ing everything)

Why did you do this?

Questions like that don't help anyone.

ancat / minserv