lactoserv Web Application Server

See also:

• Documentation:
  • doc directory, notably:
    • Configuration Guide
    • Deployment Guide
    • Development Guide
    • Quick Start Guide
• Recent Changes
• Stable Releases

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Lactoserv is a deployable experiment to see just how far one can go in terms of directly serving network traffic (specifically HTTP-ish protocols) in Node, with minimal intermediation. It is actively run in production on a small number of public-facing websites.

It is also intended as a solid foundation for prototyping high-level OS system services.

More concretely, Lactoserv is a web server which knows how to serve a handful of different types of built-in "application" and "service," with plans to add more. And it provides a programming framework for defining custom applications either standalone or together with others, including both built-in and other custom applications.

Features

• Networking:
  • Can run multiple network endpoints, each serving a different application or set thereof.
  • Can serve all of HTTP, HTTPS, and HTTP2. (HTTP2 will automatically downgrade to HTTPS for clients that can't do HTTP2.)
  • Optional rate limiting — for connections, requests, and sent data (bytes / bandwidth) — based on the classic "token bucket" / "leaky bucket" strategy.
• JS-based configuration file format, which isn't actually that awful!
• Several built-in applications, including:
  • A bunch of request routing and filtering applications, to cover the most common needs.
  • Three "leaf" applications, for regular content responses and redirection.
  • More to come!
• Several built-in services, including:
  • Access logging (that is, network request "access logs" in the usual sense), in a recognizable standard-ish form.
  • Detailed system activity logging, in a couple of different formats.
• The ability to define custom applications and services, using a modern promise-based application framework. Instead of directly dealing with the quirky core Node request and response objects, this framework exposes a friendlier and more approachable API. Maximum ergonomics: Very straightforward application logic bottoms out at a well-tested low-level implementation.

Implementation features

• Written in pure JavaScript (per se), running on Node. (The only platform native code is from Node, not from this codebase nor from any imported modules.)
  • Uses Node's standard library for low-level networking and protocol implementation (TCP, TLS, HTTP*).
  • Only sparingly uses external module dependencies (via npm).
  • Notably, does not depend on any other web application framework (Express, Fastify, etc.).
• Built to be installed as a normal POSIX-ish service (though without Node bundled into the installation).
• Developed using automated unit and integration tests. (As of this writing, test coverage stats indicate decent but not outstanding coverage.)

Requirements

To build:

• Standard-ish POSIX command-line environment. (It is known to build on recent versions of macOS and at least one flavor of Linux. It might build on Windows, but if it does nobody has told anyone on the project.)
• Recent-ish version of Bash (works with what macOS ships, which is about as old a version as you'll find on any up-to-date OS).
• Node v20 or later (tested regularly on v20 and v22).
• Recent version of jq (v1.6 or later).

To run (versions as above):

• Standard-ish POSIX operating environment.
• Recent-ish version of Bash.
• Node v20 or later. This is required because the project uses:
  • The relatively new /v flag on regular expressions, which became available as of v20.
  • The module inspector/promises (for heap dumps), which became available as of v19.

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Copyright 2022-2024 the Lactoserv Authors (Dan Bornstein et alia).
SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0