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Althttpd: Simple webserver in a single C file

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Re: Althttpd: Simple webserver in a single C file

#181

Post by wizzwizz4 »

systems wrote: post #169
henvic wrote: post #91

Take a look at Fossil too: https://www.fossil-scm.org/ It's the distributed version control (and more) used by SQLite. Most people have no idea about how cool the SQLite ecosystem is, and how it's used even on avionics!

long long long time ago Fossil destroyed code for Zed Shaw And since that day, not one looked at Fossil the same way, at least not the same way they looked at git https://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.o... I can't tell for sure how much of impact this had on fossil's adoption, its hard to beat git no matter how good you are, but I think it was a bit hit

Technically, Fossil didn't destroy the code; Zed destroyed it by running `fossil revert`. All Fossil did was run off into la la land where nothing makes sense and everything is invisible and the working directory is empty.

Still an impressive bug – but the first rule of “my CVS has broken” is “stop running commands, and copy the CVS directory somewhere else”. (I've needed to do this to a .git twice.) Had he done this, he wouldn't've lost work. While he shouldn't've had to, “stop doing everything and take a read-only copy” is the first step when any database containing important data has corrupted.

Re: Althttpd: Simple webserver in a single C file

#182

Post by dimitrios1 »

pdimitar wrote: post #100
henvic wrote: post #91

Take a look at Fossil too: https://www.fossil-scm.org/ It's the distributed version control (and more) used by SQLite. Most people have no idea about how cool the SQLite ecosystem is, and how it's used even on avionics!

The lack of ability to squash PRs into single commits is a deal breaker for many, myself included. No, having a commit "fix typo" in the main branch's history is not at all useful and won't ever be. It's noise. In a work setting it's much better to reduce noise.

Consider editing. Yes, a paper goes through revisions, which are holistic, and represent one iteration to the next. But in between those revisions, you can see markups, and editor notes as to why a change was performed.

Sometimes those insights are just as useful as the packaged whole.

Re: Althttpd: Simple webserver in a single C file

#183

Post by francislavoie »

KronisLV wrote: post #54
terminalserver wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing I love most about caddy is it automatically does all the ssl certificate garbage which is so painful in every other web server ever. Yes certbot makes it less painful but it’s still a big PITA, unlike caddy where SSL is just like magic.

The only thing I don't really know how to do with it is round robin DNS for many servers with LetsEncrypt HTTPS. It feels like then I'd probably need either shared storage for the certificate files (which goes against the idea of decentralization somewhat) or to use a DNS challenge type. Anyone have experience with something like that?

Shared storage is the solution. Caddy supports multiple different storage backends (filesystem by default, and Redis, Consul, DynamoDB via plugins) and uses the storage to write locks so that one instance of Caddy can initiate the ACME order, and another can solve the challenge. See the docs: https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https#storage

I'm doing this exact thing, with the Redis plugin behind DNSRR and it works seamlessly.

Re: Althttpd: Simple webserver in a single C file

#184

Post by coder543 »

eatonphil wrote: post #69
ecmascript wrote: post #3

I'm all for SQLite and I am a fan of the author of the project but for a webserver I have turned my back away from Nginx for https://caddyserver.com/ because of the simplicity. Caddy is just really awesome as a reverse proxy (2 line config!!) and I am in the processes of moving all my projects to it. It is fast enough as well since other things will be the bottle neck way before that. I am not affiliated with Caddy i…

A big missing feature in Caddy for me is an embedded language like Lua for nginx so you can write tiny hooks. The Caddy authors have indicated on HN a while ago that Caddy 2 may have an embedded scripting language but I can't find anything about it in their docs.

Seems like it was postponed[0].

For very tiny hooks, you might be able to get away with using request matchers[1] and respond[2].

[0]: https://caddy.community/t/missing-starlark-documentation/958...

[1]: https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/matchers

[2]: https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/directives/respond

Re: Althttpd: Simple webserver in a single C file

#185

Post by francislavoie »

petre wrote: post #65
xupybd wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And zero dependencies! This might solve my problem with older servers that no longer support the latest SSL. I really need to upgrade those rickety old machines.

You mean zero runtime deps because it pulls a lot of stuff when it does get built. Still great but I'd use traefik for more than 10 sites.

Caddy can serve thousands of sites without a sweat. What are your concerns exactly?

Re: Althttpd: Simple webserver in a single C file

#186

Post by badsectoracula »

systems wrote: post #169
henvic wrote: post #91

Take a look at Fossil too: https://www.fossil-scm.org/ It's the distributed version control (and more) used by SQLite. Most people have no idea about how cool the SQLite ecosystem is, and how it's used even on avionics!

long long long time ago Fossil destroyed code for Zed Shaw And since that day, not one looked at Fossil the same way, at least not the same way they looked at git https://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.o... I can't tell for sure how much of impact this had on fossil's adoption, its hard to beat git no matter how good you are, but I think it was a bit hit

Which is a shame because from the followup emails it becomes clear that the loss was actually Zed Shaw's fault (he explicitly typed "fossil revert" which is what deleted his code) and not the bug (there was a bug he encountered but it didn't end up in data loss).

Re: Althttpd: Simple webserver in a single C file

#187

Post by francislavoie »

eatonphil wrote: post #69
ecmascript wrote: post #3

I'm all for SQLite and I am a fan of the author of the project but for a webserver I have turned my back away from Nginx for https://caddyserver.com/ because of the simplicity. Caddy is just really awesome as a reverse proxy (2 line config!!) and I am in the processes of moving all my projects to it. It is fast enough as well since other things will be the bottle neck way before that. I am not affiliated with Caddy i…

A big missing feature in Caddy for me is an embedded language like Lua for nginx so you can write tiny hooks. The Caddy authors have indicated on HN a while ago that Caddy 2 may have an embedded scripting language but I can't find anything about it in their docs.

Writing plugins for Caddy is so easy that it's generally not necessary to have scripting built-in. You can just build yourself a new binary with a Go plugin just by using the "xcaddy" build tool. https://caddyserver.com/docs/extending-caddy

But yeah, it's still something at the back of our minds, and we were considering Starlark for this, but that hasn't really materialized because it's usually easier to just go with the plugin route.

Re: Althttpd: Simple webserver in a single C file

#188

Post by millerm »

spyke112 wrote: post #74

Sure it lives a single file, but considering the length, wouldn't it actually be better to split it into multiple files? I'm not that familiar with C, it seems to be a "thing" in C to just have giant files.

SQLite is actually maintained in many files, but they are concatenated into one file for distribution. Here is the reasoning: https://sqlite.org/amalgamation.html

Re: Althttpd: Simple webserver in a single C file

#189

Post by bawolff »

unixhero wrote: post #38
bawolff wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a high risk of http desync attacks, if you're only implementing a subset of http/1.1.

How would one attack a static page?

Who said anything about static? This webserver supports cgi, which means it supports php, perl, etc.

However even if it didn't, js based client-side apps are probably still attackable in the right set of circumstances.

Re: Althttpd: Simple webserver in a single C file

#190

Post by paulclinger »

pstuart wrote: post #177
niutech wrote: post #120

There is also redbean ( https://justine.lol/redbean/ ) - a single-file web server with embedded Lua interpreter as an Actually Portable Executable by Justine Tunney, the creator of Cosmopolitan.

That is amazing. And it looks like she may embed SQLite in as well.

Already happened; https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/pull/185 (Add sqlite3 support to Lua scripts in Redbean) has been merged.
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