This is a simple HTTP server with support for CGI programs written in Rust. It is a side project of mine and an opportunity to put my Rust learning to the test. It is very limited, just for fun and not intended to be used in a production environment :)
The HTTP server implementation from the Rust book has been used as a starter code, and the ThreadPool implementation is exactly the same.
To build this server, Rust should be installed.
To run the server:
cargo run --release
To run in debug mode with logging:
RUST_LOG=debug cargo run
The server will be listening on port 8080. You can access http://localhost:8080/ to get an overview of the built-in sample pages.
The static files are stored in the public_html folder and will be served at the root of the domain. The CGI executables are stored in the cgi-bin folder and will be served at the /cgi-bin/ path of the domain. The user running the server binary should have execution permissions for the files in this folder (otherwise a 500 Internal Server Error will be returned). The server will listen on port 8080 by default. All these parameters can be changed by changing the corresponding constants in the src/main.rs file.
See the files in the cgi-bin for some examples on how to write a CGI program.
The following CGI variables are implemented and sent to the CGI program as environment variables. See section 4.1 (Request Meta-Variables) on the CGI RFC for more information.
- AUTH_TYPE
- CONTENT_LENGTH
- CONTENT_TYPE
- GATEWAY_INTERFACE
- PATH_INFO
- PATH_TRANSLATED
- QUERY_STRING
- REMOTE_ADDR
- REMOTE_HOST
- REMOTE_IDENT
- REMOTE_USER
- REQUEST_METHOD
- SCRIPT_NAME
- SERVER_NAME
- SERVER_PORT
- SERVER_PROTOCOL
- SERVER_SOFTWARE
The following CGI response headers are accepted from the CGI program output. Any other headers are ignored. See section 6 (CGI Response) on the CGI RFC for more information.
- CONTENT_TYPE
- LOCATION
- STATUS
The response type will be inferred from the returned headers, and can be a document response, local redirect response or client redirect response. Client redirect responses with document are not supported. Information on the types of CGI responses can also be found on section 6 of the CGI RFC.
Data coming from a TCP connection is expected to be valid UTF-8. That unfortunately means no file uploads. Invalid UTF-8 data coming from the TCP stream will cause the server to respond with a 400 Bad Request response.
An 8KB buffer is used to store data received from the incoming streams. Sending more than that to the server will cause it to respond with a 413 Payload Too Large response. This buffer size can be changed in the src/http_server/request/request.rs file by changing the value of the BUFFER_SIZE constant.
A CGI response indicating a local redirect will always expect the destination to be a static resource.
The Client redirect response with document is not supported by this server implementation.