PWS - a fast, single-threaded, asynchronous, static webserver

why use something fancy like apache or nginx to serve my static files? Thats for losers!! Nothing says #developer like serving your CV on a webserver you wrote from scratch.

usage

It is suggested you run this program as root as it needs to bind to port 80 and 443

To start the webserver simply run it

./pws

If you want to run it as a daemon then you can run it with the --daeomize flag:

./pws --daemonize

This will print the PID of the daemon. When running PWS as a daemon, stdout and stderr will be rerouted to pws.log and pws_error.log respectively. These files will be created in the directory the program was started in.

configure pws

config.pws contains the config data for pws. Some fields are required and some fields may be left blank.

required fields:

• PRIVATE_KEY_FILE
• CERTIFICATE_FILE
• DOMAIN_HOST_NAME
• DOCUMENT_ROOTDIR

optional fields (can be left blank):

• C_FULLCHAIN_FILE

blacklisted urls (honeypots)

blacklinks.cfg will be read and loaded on startup. This file contains blacklisted paths that when requested by a client, will close the connection and their IP will be added to a blacklist. If a client connects and their IP is on the blacklist, this connection will be closed before the client can send any requests. This is to prevent scraper bots and malicious actors who try to attack the site by request well-known pages (admin.php, .env, etc). The blacklist is stored in memory only, so any restart clears the blacklist. The blacklist parser does not support wildcard or regex entries yet, only direct matches. Preface your entries with a leading /. Example:

/wp_access
/.env
/.env/
/admin.php
/.git
/htaccess

ther parser is case insensitive. /.Env will match /.env and vice versa.

dependencies

pws depends on libcrypto, OpenSSL and zlib. These are most likely already on your system, but in the case they aren't, you can install them with:

sudo apt install openssl zlib1g

If you are compiling pws from source you will instead need to install the development libraries:

sudo apt install libssl-dev zlib1g-dev

They will most likely be called the same or similar things on other package managers.

I have not tested which versions are compatible, but I would guess that any recent (last 5 years) release will probably do. On my development machine I am running zlib 1.2.13 and OpenSSL 3.0.17

build instructions

to compile pws, simply clone the repo and in the root directory run:

make

et-voila.

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