Webserv

This project is about writing your own HTTP server.

You will be able to test it with an actual browser.

HTTP is one of the most used protocols on the internet.

Knowing its arcane will be useful, even if you won’t be working on a website

Brief

Webserv is a project at 42 which requires us to build a HTTP server using I/O Multiplexing built on top of a event loop.

We start the server by reading a configuration file based on nginx conf, containing information like hostname(ip/port), servername, index file, directory listing, URL redirect, location and so on... The server is then able to handle connections, and serve static files, CGI scripts, and handle HTTP methods like GET, POST and DELETE.

How to use

• Compile the project with make
• Run the server with ./bin/webserv [config_file]
• Execute a curl request to it with curl -v localhost:8000

Examples

• curl -v localhost:8000
• curl -d '{"key1":"value1", "key2":"value2"}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST localhost:8000
• curl -d "param1=value1&param2=value2" -X DELETE localhost:8000

Execute CGI

curl -X GET -H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" http://localhost:9000/cgi-bin/python-cgi

How to stress test

• You can stress test the serve using siege. First you need to donwload siege with:

# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install siege

# Fedora
sudo dnf install siege

• You can run a basic stress test:

siege -c 100 -t 60s http://localhost:8000

• You can use siege -b (The siege -b option is used to run the Siege stress testing tool in benchmark mode. In benchmark mode, Siege sends a single request to the specified URL and measures the response time. The benchmark mode is useful for quickly testing the performance of a server without the need to simulate a large number of concurrent users);

siege -b http://localhost:8000

-You can check memory usage of webserv while using siege:

Get the pid:

ps aux

Test memory usage:

top -p <pid>

References

• Web Server Concepts and Examples
• What is a Server? (Deepdive)
• How to server-client sockets in C++
• Sockets - Server & Client - 2020
• Building a simple server with C++

License

This project is licensed under the Affero General Public License v3.0 - see the LICENSE file for details.