ngn13 / ctorm

Simple web framework for C

        __
  _____/ /__________  ____ ___
 / ___/ __/ ___/ __ \/ __ `__ \
/ /__/ /_/ /  / /_/ / / / / / /
\___/\__/_/   \____/_/ /_/ /_/ 1.3

ctorm | simple web framework for C

ctorm is a libevent based, multi-threaded HTTP server for HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/1.0. It has a (fairly) easy API for general web server applications.

Important!!!

This software is pretty much in alpha state. I don't suggest you use ctorm on production, however it can be used to build simple web applications just for fun.

I do plan to continue the development of this project, so please consider contributing if you are interested.

Features

• Wildcard routes
• Middleware support
• Form body parsing
• URL queries (parameters)
• JSON support with cJSON
• Handling 404 (all) routes
• Sending files and static file serving

Benchmarking

Benchmark results for hello world applications (see benchmark):

Framework	Version	Time per request
crow (C++)	v1.2.0	~4 ms
fiber (Go)	v3.0.0-beta.1	~4 ms
ctorm (C)	1.3	~5 ms
tide (Rust)	0.16.0	~12 ms
express (NodeJS)	4.19.2	~21 ms

Installation

You will need the following software in order to build and install ctorm:

• GCC and other general build tools (build-essential)
• libevent and it's headers (libevent, libevent-dev)
• cJSON and it's headers (cjson, libcjson-dev)
• tar (to extract the release archive)

First download the latest release archive, do not compile from the latest commit unless you are doing development:

wget https://github.com/ngn13/ctorm/archive/refs/tags/1.3.tar.gz
tar xf 1.3.tar.gz && cd ctorm-1.3

Then use the make command to build and install:

make && sudo make install

Getting started

Hello world application

#include <ctorm/all.h>

void hello_world(req_t *req, res_t *res) {
  // send the "Hello world!" message
  RES_SEND("Hello world!");
}

int main() {
  // create the app with default configuration
  app_t *app = app_new(NULL);

  // setup the routes
  GET(app, "/", hello_world);

  // run the app
  if (!app_run(app, "0.0.0.0:8080"))
    error("app failed: %s\n", app_geterror());

  // clean up
  app_free(app);
  return 0;
}

Other functions

• App
• Logging
• Request
• Response

Example applications

Repository also contains few example applications in the example folder, you can build these by running make example.

Deploying your application

You can use the docker image (built with actions) to easily deploy your application, here is an example:

FROM ghcr.io/ngn13/ctorm:latest

WORKDIR /app

# copy over all the sources
COPY src       ./src
COPY Makefile  ./
COPY main.c    ./

# run the make script
RUN make

# set the startup command
CMD ["/app/server"]

Development

For development, you can compile the library with debug mode:

make DEBUG=1

then you can use the example applications for testing:

make example
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./dist ./dist/example_hello