webserv

This project is to create a HTTP server in C++. Concepts about socket programming are introduced.

HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web. With this project, we build a webserver from scratch, which can be tested with a real browser.

This is a group project completed by Q. Li & R. Bakker & G. Bouwen.

Technical considerations

Full details are included in the webserv_subject.pdf file

• Use only one select for all the IO between the client and server
• select should check read and write at the same time. It should never block, and the client should bounce properly if necessary
• Never do a read or write operation without going through select
• A request to your server should never hang forever
• You server should have default error pages
• You can’t use fork for something else than CGI

Handled HTTP headers

• General header: Date
• Request header: User-Agent, Referer, Host, Authorization
• Response header: Server, Last-Modified, Transfer-Encoding, WWW-Authenticate, Location
• Entity header: Content-Length, Content-Type, Content-Language, Content-Location, Allow

How to test

Disclaimer: The current version works on Ubuntu distributions.

$ git clone https://github.com/qingqingqingli/webserv
$ cd webserv
$ make
# run the executable with one valid config provided
$ ./webserv configuration_files/valid/default.conf

Demo

The demo below shows how to run the webserv with the default config file. It demonstrated the loading of a static webpage, cgi output, authentication, autoindex, HTTP redirection.