📌 About the project

webServerHTTP is a simple educational HTTP server written in C++ using Windows API (WinSock2).
The main goal of this project is to practice network programming, understand the basics of the HTTP protocol,
and learn how to build and structure a server application in C++.

It is not a production-ready server, but rather a training project for: Understanding socket programming in Windows Handling multiple client connections Serving static web content (HTML files) Building projects with CMake

✅ What has been done

TCP listener (TcpListener) + non-blocking sockets Basic WebServer with request parsing Serving files from wwwroot/ GET / POST / DELETE Content-Length body reading CMake project structure

To Do (Roadmap)

1️⃣ CONFIGURATION SYSTEM (MANDATORY)

Server-level directives

Algorithm: 1 class (ServerConfig) + the parser class (ConfigParser)

• listen – define host:port the server listens on
• server_name – domain names for virtual host routing
• root – base directory for serving static files
• index – default file served for directories
• error_page – map HTTP status codes to custom HTML pages
• client_max_body_size – limit the size of request bodies

Location / route directives

• allowed_methods – allowed HTTP methods (GET, POST, DELETE)
• autoindex – enable/disable directory listing
• upload_store – directory where uploaded files are saved
• root (per location) – override root for this specific route
• index (per location) – override index for this route

CGI directives

• cgi_extension – file extensions triggering CGI execution
• cgi_path – path to the CGI interpreter (php-cgi, python3, etc.)

Config parser behavior

• Multiple server blocks
• Default server behavior
• Support nested blocks
• Support multiple location blocks
• Ignore whitespace and newlines
• Detect invalid syntax

2️⃣ HTTP HEADERS (MANDATORY FROM RFC 7230–7235)

• Host
• User-Agent
• Content-Length
• Content-Type
• Accept-Charset
• Authorization
• Date
• Server
• Location
• Retry-After
• WWW-Authenticate
• Accept-Language
• Allow
• Content-Language
• Content-Location
• Last-Modified
• Referer
• Transfer-Encoding

3️⃣ DEFAULT ERROR PAGES (REQUIRED)

• 404 Not Found
• 403 Forbidden
• 500 Internal Server Error

4️⃣ NON-BLOCKING SERVER CORE

• Non-blocking sockets using fcntl(O_NONBLOCK)
• Single select() loop for ALL FDs
• No read/write without select
• Handle partial reads
• Handle partial writes
• State-machine per client (READ → PROCESS → WRITE)
• Graceful client disconnect

5️⃣ HTTP REQUEST PARSER

• Parse request line (METHOD URI VERSION)
• Parse headers (strict RFC)
• Validate Host
• Normalize URL (remove ../, duplicate slashes)
• Detect body type
• Handle Content-Length body
• Handle chunked transfer encoding
• Support incomplete request reads

6️⃣ HTTP RESPONSE GENERATION

• Create status line (HTTP/1.1 )
• Send required headers
• Serve static files (non-blocking)
• Directory handling - [ ] index file
  - [ ] autoindex (HTML generation)
• Correct error response fallback
• Chunked responses (when body size unknown)
• Keep-alive connections (optional but recommended)

7️⃣ ROUTING SYSTEM

• Select correct server block based on Host header
• Select correct location based on URI
• Apply location-level root/index/allow rules
• Return 405 for disallowed methods
• Return 404 for missing files
• Return 403 for forbidden paths

8️⃣ CGI SYSTEM (FULLY MANDATORY)

• Fork ONLY for CGI
• Set all CGI meta-variables, including: - [ ] REQUEST_METHOD
  - [ ] SCRIPT_NAME
  - [ ] PATH_INFO
  - [ ] PATH_TRANSLATED
  - [ ] QUERY_STRING
  - [ ] CONTENT_LENGTH
  - [ ] CONTENT_TYPE
  - [ ] SERVER_PROTOCOL
  - [ ] SERVER_NAME
  - [ ] SERVER_PORT
  - [ ] GATEWAY_INTERFACE
  - [ ] REMOTE_ADDR
• Send request body to CGI stdin
• Read CGI stdout until EOF
• Respect CGI headers (Status, Content-Type, etc.)
• Support php-cgi
• Correct working directory (chdir to file’s directory)

9️⃣ STABILITY / PERFORMANCE REQUIREMENTS

• No memory leaks (valgrind clean)
• No crashes even under stress
• No hanging requests
• FD cleanup for every client
• Survive multiple parallel clients