Echo

A full fledged light weight web server written in C

This document provides a brief overview of the web server, how to compile and run it, and potential improvements for future versions.

Note: This project is still under development. It is missing a lot of features and is not ready for production use.

Overview

I made this project to learn more about how web servers work. It is not intended for real-world use.

The web server is a multi-threaded non-blocking web server written in C. It uses the TCP/IP protocol for communication and listens on port 80. The server can handle a maximum of 5 queued connections before it starts dropping new incoming connections.

Compilation

To compile the server, you need a C compiler such as gcc. A Makefile is provided to make compilation easier. To compile the server, use the following command:

make

This is the same as running the following command:

gcc ./src/server.c -o server -lpthread -Wall

This will create an executable named server.

Running the Server

To run the server, use the following command:

./server

The server will start and listen for incoming connections on port 80.

Testing the Server

To test the server, you can use a web browser or a tool like curl. The server will respond with a 200 Hello World response for any request it receives.

curl localhost:80

Deleting the Executable

To delete the executable, use the following command:

make clean

Future Improvements

• Improved Multithreading: The current server is multi-threaded, but it is not very efficient. The server could be improved to use a thread pool to handle incoming connections which will reduce the overhead of creating and destroying threads.

• Logging: The server currently does not have any logging mechanism. Adding logging would help track and debug issues.

• Configuration: The server's settings (like the port number and the maximum number of connections) are currently hardcoded. These could be made configurable through a configuration file or command-line arguments.

• Security: Implementing SSL/TLS to secure the communication between the client and the server.

• HTTP Parsing: The server could be improved to handle HTTP requests and responses, turning it into a fully-fledged HTTP server.