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Writing our own HTTP server in C++.

About the project

A project made in accordance with the Webserv project which is part of the Codam Core Curriculum. This project was a collaboration between with Marès Verbrugge, Flen Huisman and Felicia Koolhoven. We created our own HTTP server in C++, following HTTP 1.1 and taking nginx as an example. HTTP is one of the most used protocols on the internet. We tested our webserv in a browser (Firefox).

Getting started

Start by cloning the repository:

git clone https://github.com/maresverbrugge/webserv.git

Go into the minishell directory and compile by using make:

make

Usage

⚠️ Please note this project is made for Linux only! ⚠️

Webserv takes as input a configuration file, similar to an nginx configuration file. It contains directives such as host (e.g. localhost), port (e.g. 8080) and route (e.g. /pages). See the config folder for examples or read the subject to find the configuration file requirements. To use our default configuration:

./webserv config/default.conf

You can then make requests through the browser. For example:

http://localhost:8081/

Important features

You can find all the requirement we had to meet in the subject. Our webserv:

  • Is compatible with at least Mozilla Firefox
  • Can serve a fully static website
  • Handles GET, POST and DELETE requests
  • Uses epoll to efficiently monitor all sockets / file descriptors
  • Will provide accurate HTTP response status codes and error pages
  • Allows you to upload and delete files on specified locations
  • Can execute CGI, for example to generate an HTML page through a Python script

Important learnings

This was the first group project we did in C++. We spent about 2.5 months on it and passed it with bonus points! We gained knowledge on:

  1. Object-oriented programming, designing classes
  2. I/O multiplexing using epoll
  3. HTTP requests and responses
  4. The inner workings of webservers
  5. Writing reliable parsers in C++
  6. Using Git and GitHub in a collaborative way
  7. Concurrent programming (to handle CGI)
  8. Modern C++ and smart pointers
  9. HTML, CSS and JavaScript (for our test web pages)
  10. Python (for our CGI scripts)

Contact

See our profile pages for ways to contact us!