README

Project: "Tippy" HTTP/1.1 Server

Brief

Lately I've been on an HTTP (1.1) server writing frenzy, and I decided to try Python 3.x for implementing a toy web server. This is a toy project made only for learning purposes and to show off my skills. Finally, I credit the "HTTP Made Really Easy" guide and RFC 9112 as my references. Feel free to fork, etc.

Supported HTTP Features:

• Basic message reading:
  • Basic syntax checks are done.
  • Headers such as Host, Content-Length and Content-Type are checked.
• Persistent or closing connection handling.
• HEAD and GET methods.
• Basic cache control headers are supported.

Other Features:

• Producer-Worker thread pooling for handling multiple connections (WIP)
• Graceful shutdown (WIP)

Bugs:

1. On multiple tabs from Firefox, only one worker is providing service although another is also awake. This could be dependent on varying browser behavior on refresh. Edge / Chrome usually restarts a new connection on a random port, but Firefox seems more conservative with starting new connections?

Old Sample Run:

Some cURL Test Commands:

• curl --verbose -I http://localhost:8080/index.html (HEAD of static resource)
• curl --verbose -X GET http://localhost:8080/index.html (GET page)
• curl --verbose -X GET http://localhost:8080/info.html (GET page)
• curl --verbose -X GET http://localhost:8080/index.html -H "Connection: Close" -H "If-Modified-Since: Mon, 12 Jun 2023 23:59:59 GMT" (GET page with update date check... modify public/index.html to test this.)

Things To Do??

1. Refactor server code to be cleaner: modular, well-named, etc. (WIP)
2. Add URL parsing for relative and absolute URLs.
3. Add threading. (WIP)
4. Support 100 Continue. (To do...)

Usage:

1a. On a Mac or UNIX system, run ifconfig -a in the terminal and find your IPv4 address under inet. 1b. On Windows, run ipconfig in the shell and find your IPv4 address. 2. Create a config.json file in the project root folder. It should follow this format:

{
   "serveaddr": "localhost",
   "port": 8080,
   "backlog": 4
}

3. Run python3 src/main.py for Mac, or python src/main.py for Windows within the project root folder.
4. Make requests with cURL or your browser!