WebCerver

A minimal HTTP/1.1 server written in C for learning purposes. Features raw socket programming, and a basic request parsing pipeline.

Features

• TCP socket server with connection handling
• HTTP/1.1 request parsing (GET method, headers, body)
• Thread-per-connection model using pthreads
• Clean Makefile with dependency tracking

Table of Contents

• Project Structure
• Building
• Running
• Architecture
• Dependencies

Project Structure

.
├── lib/
│   └── sds/              # Simple Dynamic Strings library
│       ├── sds.h
│       ├── sds.c
│       └── sdsalloc.h
├── src/
│   ├── main.c            # Entry point, server loop
│   ├── network.h/.c      # Socket abstraction (bind, listen, accept, read, close, send)
│   ├── server.h/.c       # Request dispatch (process_request)
│   └── http.h/.c         # HTTP parsing (request line, headers, body)
├── Makefile              # Build system
├── LICENSE
└── README.md

Building

Prerequisites

• C compiler (clang or gcc)
• make
• pthreads

Build Commands

# Build debug binary (default)
make

# Build and run in one step
make run

# Clean build artifacts
make clean

Output binary location: ./output/main

Running

# After building
./output/main

# Or use make target
make run

Server listens on port 8080 (hardcoded in src/main.c). Test with:

curl http://localhost:8080/
curl -X GET http://localhost:8080/test

Architecture

Request Flow

main.c (server loop)
    └── pthread_create → handle_connection()
            └── network.c → read_request()
            └── server.c → process_request()
                    └── http.c → http_parse()
                            ├── split_request()  (request line / headers / body)
                            ├── parse_request_line()
                            ├── parse_headers()
                            └── parse_body()

Module Responsibilities

Module	Responsibility
main.c	Socket setup, accept loop, thread spawning
network.c	Socket creation, bind, listen, accept, read, close
server.c	Request/response orchestration (stub)
http.c	HTTP/1.1 parsing into HttpRequest struct
sds	Dynamic string buffer (growable, binary-safe)

Dependencies

• SDS (bundled in lib/sds/)
• pthread
• Standard C library

License

The Unlicense (see LICENSE)

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