My own HTTP server

An HTTP/1.1 server built from scratch in Python, on raw TCP sockets. No frameworks.

I built it to learn how the web works under the hood: parsing, keep-alive, TLS, streaming and graceful shutdown.

What it does

• Two engines: a thread pool, and a non-blocking event loop with pipelining
• HTTPS with TLS 1.2+, and an HTTP to HTTPS redirect
• Chunked bodies, streaming responses, sendfile for static files, ETags
• Proper errors for bad requests (400, 413, 414, 431, 501, 505)
• A built-in API playground at /playground, with mock routes, request replay and scenarios
• Metrics with p50, p95 and p99 latency at /_metrics

Run

Needs Python 3.11+.

python3 -m pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
scripts/start_server.sh        # https://127.0.0.1:8443
scripts/start_server.sh http   # plain HTTP

Then open /playground.

More

Every route, flag and benchmark is in docs/reference.md.