s9v / http-server

Simple HTTP/1.1 server in C++

http-server

Simple HTTP/1.1 server in C++

When implementing this HTTP/1.1 server, I referred to the following more refined RFCs (instead of the original RFC2616):

• RFC7230 - HTTP/1.1: Message Syntax and Routing
• RFC7231 - HTTP/1.1: Semantics and Content
• RFC7232 - HTTP/1.1: Conditional Requests
• RFC7233 - HTTP/1.1: Range Requests
• RFC7234 - HTTP/1.1: Caching
• RFC7235 - HTTP/1.1: Authentication

For more info, see RFC2616 is Dead.

Features

Currently available:

• IPv4 only
• Serving static files
• Methods: only GET
• MIME types: text/html, text/css, image/jpg, image/png

NOT available yet:

• IPv6
• Multipart data
• Conditional requests
• Range requests
• Basic authentication over HTTP
• Methods: HEAD, POST, PUT, DELETE, CONNECT, OPTIONS, TRACE

How to build and run

Build using:

make build

It will generate an output executable http-server. To run it:

./http-server --dir tests/sample-serve-dir --port 8080

Go to localhost:8080/index.html on your browser. If you go to localhost:8080 you will get 404 Not Found error.

Performance

The script for testing concurrent connections tests/stress-10000-index-html.sh tries to download 10,000 copies of index.html file with 10,000 parallel curl connections. It doesn't finish in 1 second, but it does finish 5~6 secs. I believe the bottleneck is disk writes and not the server performance.

A test script to measure the number of requests the server is able to handle per second is TBD.

Future work

• Measure performance
  • Number of requests per second
  • Number of concurrent connections
• Restructure code from C-style method collection to C++ OOP approach (future subdirectory)
• Migrate tests to Google Test
• Replace threading approach with async I/O
• Audit security
  • Review "Security Considerations" sections (in all of above mentioned RFCs)
  • Known issue: Currently, requesting /../somefile will serve a file outside of the served directory, which is a security disaster.

Acknowledgments

• A refresher on Unix Socket Programming: http://www.linuxhowtos.org/C_C++/socket.htm