Simple-HTTP-Server

Simple HTTP server for directory listing or hosting HTML files

Overview

This C program is a basic HTTP server implementation designed to handle HTTP GET requests for files or directories. It utilizes epoll, a system call available in Linux, for efficiently managing multiple simultaneous connections. When a file is requested, the server serves it as downloadable content. In the case of a directory request, the server provides a basic listing of the directory contents. If an HTML file is requested, it is hosted and served as a webpage instead of being offered as downloadable content. If index.html inside hosted directory, it will serve the website base on it instead of directory listing. This server is suitable for simple file serving tasks and can handle multiple connections concurrently.

Dependencies

Linux Operating System with support for POSIX-compliant system calls, some recommendations are:

• Ubuntu 20.04 and later
• Fedora 32 and later
• Debian 10 and later

GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for Compilation

• GCC 9.3.0 and later

Set up

First you need to clone this repository and make executable

git clone https://github.com/tyler232/Simple-HTTP-Server.git
cd Simple-HTTP-Server
make

Executable will be created in your ~/server_bin, you need to export the path to use it directly

# Add this to your .bashrc
export PATH="$HOME/server_bin:$PATH"

If you are running a firewall on your server, you need to allow traffic on the port your HTTP server will use (default is 8080).

# Check firewall status
sudo systemctl status firewalld

# let firewall allow traffic on 8080
sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=8080/tcp --permanent
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Usage

server  # host current directory on port 8080

server --port=8000 # host on port 8000, make sure firewall allows

server --directory=dir/my_dir # host directory with path dir/my_dir on port 8080

server --port=8000 --directory=dir/my_dir # host directory with path dir/my_dir on port 8000

Contributions

Contributions are welcome! Please fork the repository and submit pull requests.

Contact

For any questions or issues, please open an issue on this repo.