ctorm | simple web framework for C

ctorm is a libevent based, multi-threaded HTTP server for HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/1.0. It has a (fairly) easy API for general web server applications.

Important!!!

This software is pretty much in alpha state. I don't you should be using ctorm on production, however it can be used to build simple web applications just for fun.

I do plan to continue the development of this project, so please consider contributing if you are interested.

Features

• URL queries (parameters)
• Form body parsing
• Simple dynamic 'rendering'
• Sending files
• Handling 404 (all) routes
• Regex based routing

Benchmarking

Benchmark results for hello world applications (see benchmark):

Framework	Time per request
crow (C++)	~3 ms
fiber (Go)	~3 ms
ctorm (C)	~4 ms
tide (Rust)	~10 ms
express (NodeJS)	~24 ms

Installation

You will need the following software in order to build and install ctorm:

• GCC and other general build tools (build-essential)
• libevent and it's headers (libevent, libevent-dev)
• tar (to extract the release archive)

First download the latest release archive:

export VERSION="<latest version>"
wget https://github.com/ngn13/ctorm/archive/refs/tags/$VERSION.tar.gz
tar xf $VERSION.tar.gz
cd ctorm-$VERSION

Then use the make command for the build and install:

make && sudo make install

Getting started

Hello world application

#include <ctorm/macros.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>

// this function handles GET request that go to '/'
void hello_world(req_t* req, res_t* res){
  // just send the string 'hello world!'
  RES_SEND("hello world!");
}

// main function (entrypoint)
int main(){
  // init the application
  app_t *app = app_new();

  // setup a GET route for '/'
  GET("/", hello_world);
  
  // start the application on port 8080 
  APP_RUN("127.0.0.1:8080");
}

Other functions

• App
• Logging
• Request
• Response
• Rendering

Example application

Repository also contains an example application in the example folder, you can build this app with make test.

Deploying your application

You can use the docker image (built with actions) to easily deploy your application, here is an example:

FROM ghcr.io/ngn13/ctorm:latest 

WORKDIR /app

# copy over all the sources
COPY template  ./template
COPY src       ./src
COPY Makefile  ./
COPY main.c    ./

# run the make script
RUN make 

# set the startup command
CMD ["/app/server"]

Development

For development purposes, you can use the example application, and compile the library with debug mode:

make DEBUG=1 && make test

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