Why? How is this better than running nginx or Apache2?
Sometimes it's just fun.
Show HN: Hosting my website using my C web server
61–70 of 160 posts
Re: Show HN: Hosting my website using my C web server
#62Only 3.4k of C code for a full http and https server? I honestly thought you would need a lot more for it to be fully compliant with the spec.
There are a few other HTTP/1.1 servers at that kind of size https://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/benchmarks.html
Re: Show HN: Hosting my website using my C web server
#63Great project. Down for me. $ curl http://playin.coz.is/index.html curl: (7) Failed to connect to playin.coz.is port 80 after 166 ms: Couldn't connect to server
It's a fantastic way to make a random, newly written web server in C safe and secure.
Re: Show HN: Hosting my website using my C web server
#64Great project. Down for me. $ curl http://playin.coz.is/index.html curl: (7) Failed to connect to playin.coz.is port 80 after 166 ms: Couldn't connect to server
Hey, just checked. Server didn't crash. I wonder what happened?
Re: Show HN: Hosting my website using my C web server
#65Cool! I also wrote my own C web server (sources linked below) which ran a commercial website for a while. It's amazing how small and light you can make an HTTP/1.1 webserver. The commercial site ran on a machine with 128MB of RAM and 1 CPU (sic) and routinely served a large proportion of schools in the UK with a closed source interactive, web-based chat system. However that was 20 years ago when the internet was a slightly less hostile place.
He mentions bots make great fuzzers, but I think he should also do a bit of actual fuzzing.
http://git.annexia.org/?p=rws.git;a=tree Requires: http://git.annexia.org/?p=c2lib.git;a=tree http://git.annexia.org/?p=pthrlib.git;a=tree
Re: Show HN: Hosting my website using my C web server
#66Only 3.4k of C code for a full http and https server? I honestly thought you would need a lot more for it to be fully compliant with the spec.
I wrote a simple embedded C webserver to provide a liveview of data acquisition for one of my experiments that weighs in at <250LOC. Ok, I wouldn't put it on the public internet, and it only implements a small fraction of HTTP/1.1, but it works and only requires mallocing at initialization...
If you control the client, you can make webservers that are very small indeed. Here's one we use for local testing, where we know the client will be libcurl and know exactly what requests will be made: https://gitlab.com/nbdkit/nbdkit/-/blob/master/tests/web-ser... Basically 600 LoC. It would be completely insecure if exposed to the internet, but (by design) it can only serve over Unix domain sockets.
Re: Show HN: Hosting my website using my C web server
#67Only 3.4k of C code for a full http and https server? I honestly thought you would need a lot more for it to be fully compliant with the spec.
Http/1.1 is dead simple if you ignore most of the spec. If you only take get requests and set content-length on response you will be good for 99% of user agents. It’s not much more code to handle the transfer-encoding and byte-range headers. HTTPS is just http over a tls socket which is the level of abstraction you should have if you don’t roll your own crypto. It’s fun and not that bad really.
Why HTTP/1.1?
Everybody speaks HTTP/1.0 and it is even simpler.
Re: Show HN: Hosting my website using my C web server
#68I like the string handling, especially
#define LIT(S) ((string) {.data=(S), .size=sizeof(S)-1})
#define STR(S) ((string) {.data=(S), .size=strlen(S)})Re: Show HN: Hosting my website using my C web server
#69I like the string handling, especially #define LIT(S) ((string) {.data=(S), .size=sizeof(S)-1}) #define STR(S) ((string) {.data=(S), .size=strlen(S)})
I wonder how small the hosting machine can get btw. 8 bit atari seems to small (76 kb of compiled code on my arm64, but it wouldn't get much smaller), however some atmega would suffice I guess
Re: Show HN: Hosting my website using my C web server
#70> No reverse proxies required!
This is one that has always baffled me. If there's no specific reason that a reverse proxy is helpful, I will often hang an app with an embedded Jetty out on the internet without one. This has never lead to any problems.
Infra or security people will see this and ask why I don't have an nginx instance in front of it. When I ask why I need one, the answers are all hand-wavy security or performance, lacking any specifics. The most specific answer I received once was slow loris, which hasn't been an issue for years.
Is reverse proxying something we've collectively decided to cargo cult, or is there some reason why it's a good idea that applies in the general case that I'm missing?