TritonHTTP

A web server that implements a subset of the HTTP/1.1 protocol, from scratch in Go. The server supports concurrent connections, persistent connections, HTTP pipelining, and virtual hosting.

Description

TritonHTTP follows the general HTTP message format. It supports the following features:

• HTTP version supported: HTTP/1.1
• Request method supported: GET
• Response status supported:
  • 200 OK
  • 400 Bad Request
  • 404 Not Found
• Request headers:
  • Host (required)
  • Connection (optional, Connection: close has special meaning influencing server logic)
  • Other headers are allowed, but won't have any effect on the server logic
• Response headers:
  • Date (required)
  • Last-Modified (required for a 200 response)
  • Content-Type (required for a 200 response)
  • Content-Length (required for a 200 response)
  • Connection: close (required in response for a Connection: close request, or for a 400 response)
  • Response headers should be written in sorted order for the ease of testing
  • Response headers should be returned in 'canonical form', meaning that the first letter and any letter following a hyphen should be upper-case. All other letters in the header string should be lower-case.

Usage

The source code for tools needed to interact with TritonHTTP can be found in cmd. The following commands can be used to launch these tools:

1. make fetch - Allows you to construct custom responses and send them to the web server. Please refer to the README in fetch's directory for more information.

2. make gohttpd - Starts up Go's inbuilt web-server.

3. make tritonhttpd - Starts up TritonHTTP (localhost, port 8080).

Refer Makefile for more details.

Tests

Some basic tests can be found in cmd/tritonhttpd.

Source code

The source code for the web server can be found in tritonhttp/.

Virtual Hosting

In some cases, it is desirable to host multiple web servers on a single physical machine. This allows all the hosted web servers to share the physical server’s resources such as memory and processing, and in particular, to share a single IP address. This project implements virtual hosting by allowing TritonHTTP to host multiple servers. Each of these servers has a unique host name and maps to a unique docroot directory (in docroot_dirs/) on the physical server. Every request sent to TritonHTTP includes the “Host” header, which is used to determine the web server that each request is destined for.