CgiHTTPServer

This is a lightweight HTTP server that was created for teaching purposes. It can handle static and dynamic (CGI-like) responses.

You can clone the project with the following shell command:

git clone https://github.com/jgutie2r/CgiHTTPServer.git

or you can do it from Eclipse if you have a git plugin installed.

This is an HTTP server that can handle static or dynamic (CGI-like) requests.

The first thing is to determine which handler (static or dynamic) should be created to create the response. In this implementation it is used a file that has the mapping between the URL and the process that should be executed. If the URL requested is in this mapping then a dynamic CGI-like handler is created, otherwise, a static handler is created.

The directory where resources are located, the maximum number of concurrent requests and the port number are specified in the config.ini file. Also you can configure the prefix of resources that require user/password and the name of the file in that path that stores that user/password information.

This is the config.ini file included in the project:

PATH=/var/web/resources/ CGI_MAPPINGS_FILE=/var/web/config/cgi_mappings.txt NUM_THREADS=500 SERVER_PORT=8080 AUTH_PREFIX=private CREDENTIALS=.creds

This means that:

1. The static resources are located in the path /var/web/resources
   If the URI is http://server:8080/path/resource
   then there should exists /var/web/resources/path/resource
   in order to have a 200 OK response with the resource

2. The cgi mappings are located in that file. That file contains lines with this format:

   url1;process1 argName1 ... argNameN

   url2;process2 argName1 ... argNameM

   So that if the URL requested matches any of the URLs in this file then the specified process will be executed to generate the response.

   The response can be a full HTML page, XML, JSON or a part of a page if the request is made from JavaScript (Ajax).

3. The server can deal with 500 concurrent requests.

4. The server listen in port 8080

5. If the path starts with private then the server sends to the client a 401 message asking for user and password.
   Sample URL that triggers this behaviour:
   http://server:8080/privateSite1/index.html

6. This is the file name that stores the user and password. This should be a text file that has a single line with the format:
   user;password

   So in the previous URL example it is assumed that there exists the following file:
   /var/web/resources/privateSite1/.creds
   

   Each path can have its own .creds file storing different user/password.

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This is part of a teaching subject in Server Side Web Applications Programming.

This code is the improvement of the static server located at https://github.com/jgutie2r/StaticHTTPServer

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Juan Gutierrez Aguado (PhD)
Departamento de Informatica - Computer Science Department
Universidad de Valencia - Valencia University
Spain