httpserv

An http server building library written in C (this project is inspired by rsweb)

Introduction

This project aims to provide a simple web server with cweb as well as a powerful abstraction library with libhttpserv. Everything in this server is meant to conform to HTTP/1.1

Compilation

Dependencies

• openssl
• libtree (managed as a submodule)
• cmocka (for testing only)

Building

1. git submodule init
2. git submodule update
3. ./configure
4. make

This will build libhttpserv.so and cweb.

Configure script

The script configure.sh can be used to control the compilation process. If you wish to combine settings just pass them all to ./configure.sh

Prefix

The prefix controls the directory prefix to which make install installs the generated binaries and libraries. Usually this will be something like /usr or /usr/local. To change it use ./configure.sh -p <prefix>

Release

The release mode compiles everything with optimization enabled. In the future it may also control certain features (for example debug logging that will be disabled in release mode). Enable it with ./configure.sh -r

Debug

The debug mode compiles everything with debug flags for gdb. Enable it with ./configure.sh -d

Environment

The environment is only important to compilation for tests at the moment. As in docker containers you can't do IPv6. Possible values are:

• TEST_ENV_DOCKER: The docker environment (no IPv6)
• TEST_ENV_NORMAL: The normal environment

Testing

For testing you need to have cmocka installed. If you have it installed you can run make tests and it will run through the tests.

cweb

Invoking the program

After compilation you can simply run ./cweb in the root of the project. This will run cweb with its defaults. To see the options you can pass it run ./cweb --help.

Configuration

cweb has two configuration files: One controlling basic behavior and one for setting routes.

Basic configuration

The basic configuration is a key-value configuration file. However it does have namespaces

# this is a comment
http.some.value = hello
http.ip = ::1
http.port = 8080
# an actual value isn't needed here, however it needs to be parsed by the
# parser
http.v6 = true

A comment starts with a #. The parser treats all values as strings (so after parsing the value of http.port is the string 8080 instead of the number)

SSL

For ssl support you only need to add the following lines:

ssl.certfile = certs.pem
ssl.privkeyfile = privkey.pem

Route configuration

The route configuration file defines the routes that should be loaded into the web server. Its syntax is <regex>=><routesto>[|<kind>]. A regular expression, for which request paths are to be routed, followed by => and the path they will be routed to and optionally a | followed by the kind of route one of

• alias (instead of the requested path, <routesto> will be used and 200 should be used)
• redirect 301 will be used (browsers may cache this response and automatically redirect on their end)
• route 302 will be used (browsers won't cache)