EnebzHTTP

EnebzHTTP is a simple HTTP server written in C.

At the moment, it supports GET requests with HTTP/1.1 protocol.

The server also comes with a configurable rate limiter.

Technicals

The HTTP Server is written in C and uses Winsock2 for networking.

It is multithreaded and uses a per-client-thread to handle incoming requests.

The server is not secure and is not optimized for real world usage.

It is simply a project to learn more about C programming and various techniques within computer science.

Rate limiting

Rate limiting is done using a token bucket algorithm.

Each client has a token bucket per route with a maximum capacity of a configurable amount of tokens.

Each token represents 1 request.

When a client makes a request, a token is removed from the bucket. If the bucket is empty, the client is rate limited.

The bucket is refilled at a rate of 1 token per a given interval.

Purpose

This project was built to learn more about C programming and various techniques within computer science. I would not recommend using this server in a production environment.

What I learned

While building this server, I learned about the following topics:

• Networking
  • HTTP protocol
  • TCP/IP
  • Sockets
  • Client/Server architecture
• Data structures
  • Linked lists
  • Binary Search Trees
  • Hashtables
• Programming concepts
  • Multithreadding
  • Thread safety and locking
  • Memory management
  • File I/O
  • Error handling
  • Makefiles

Future plans

• Parse HTTP headers
• Add support for requests with bodies
• Add support for HTTPS
• Add support for IPv6
• Thread pool (optional over per-client-thread)
• Make server more secure
• Optimize memory management