via-httplib

A library for embedding an HTTP or HTTPS server in C++ applications.

The library's aim is to provide an asynchronous HTTP server that complies with rfc2616 using standard C++ types wherever possible.

Note: also supports HTTP and HTTPS clients.

Requirements

• The boost C++ library, especially asio, see boost. Tested with version 1.55.

• A C++11 compiler, it's been tested with MSVC 2013 and MinGw 4.8. If you need a C++03 version then download tag 1.0.3 or from the C++03 branch, but please be aware of this warning: old compilers

• For HTTPS, the OpenSSL library, see openssl. Please use version 1.0.1g or later (i.e. not 1.0.2-beta1) to avoid the heartbeat overflow issue.

Getting Started

Download the latest tagged version of via-httplib from Github and follow the instructions here: Make.
Or simply build the .cpp files into your application (there are only 8 of them).

via-http lib depends on the boost libraries. If boost is not installed on your machine then download the latest package from boost and follow the instructions here: boost getting started.

The boost asio library (and hence via-httplib) depends upon the OpenSSL library to implement SSL/TLS sockets. If you require an HTTPS server or client then you'll need to install the OpenSSL library as well. Please note that a plain HTTP server should not require OpenSLL.

If OpenSLL is not installed on your machine then download the latest stable package from openssl source and build it. Note: a binary distribution may be available for your machine, see: OpenSSL binaries, which could save you a lot of trouble, since building the OpenSSL binaries can be a long and difficult process...

Example

A simple HTTP server (simple_http_server.cpp):

#include "via/comms/tcp_adaptor.hpp"
#include "via/http_server.hpp"
#include <iostream>

/// Define an HTTP server using std::string to store message bodies
typedef via::http_server<via::comms::tcp_adaptor, std::string> http_server_type;
typedef http_server_type::http_connection_type http_connection;

namespace
{
  /// The handler for incoming HTTP requests.
  /// Prints the request and responds with 200 OK.
  void request_handler(http_connection::weak_pointer weak_ptr,
                       via::http::rx_request const& request,
                       std::string const& body)
  {
    std::cout << "Rx request: " << request.to_string();
    std::cout << "Rx headers: " << request.headers().to_string();
    std::cout << "Rx body: "    << body << std::endl;

    via::http::tx_response response(via::http::response_status::code::OK);
    response.add_server_header();
    response.add_date_header();
    weak_ptr.lock()->send(response);
  }
}

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
  try
  {
    // The asio io_service.
    boost::asio::io_service io_service;

    // Create the HTTP server, attach the request handler
    // and accept IPV4 connections on the default port (80)
    http_server_type http_server(io_service);
    http_server.request_received_event(request_handler);
    boost::system::error_code error(http_server.accept_connections());
    if (error)
    {
      std::cerr << "Error: "  << error.message() << std::endl;
      return 1;
    }

    // Start the server
    io_service.run();
  }
  catch (std::exception& e)
  {
    std::cerr << "Exception:"  << e.what() << std::endl;
    return 1;
  }

  return 0;
}

This server will output all of the requests that it receives to std::cout and respond with a 200 OK response to each of them. e.g. a request from Google Chrome on a Windows 7 PC:

Rx request: GET /hello HTTP/1.1
Rx headers: accept: */*
accept-encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
accept-language: en-GB,en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.6
connection: keep-alive
content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
host: 127.0.0.1
user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/31.0.1650.63 Safari/537.36

Rx body:

e.g. a request from Internet Explorer on a Windows 7 PC:

Rx request: GET /hello HTTP/1.1
Rx headers: accept: text/html, application/xhtml+xml, */*
accept-encoding: gzip, deflate
accept-language: en-GB
connection: Keep-Alive
dnt: 1
host: 127.0.0.1
user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/6.0)

Rx body:

An equivalent simple HTTPS server can be found here:simple_https_server.cpp

Further Information

User Guide

Design Notes