This project has been created as part of the 1337/42 curriculum by @me, @BusCops and @YbencheL.

Description

This project focuses on building our own HTTP web server from scratch. The goal is to understand how web servers work internally by implementing their core components and handling real HTTP communication.

To better understand the scope of this project, it is important to first define what an HTTP web server is.

HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is a protocol built on top of TCP/IP. It allows communication between two machines through a request/response model.

HTTP is a stateless protocol, meaning that each request is independent and the connection does not retain information between requests. This is why mechanisms like cookies are used—to simulate stateful behavior on top of a stateless protocol.

In HTTP, client interactions are performed using methods such as GET, POST, DELETE, etc. Each request sent by the client is processed by the server, which then returns a response.

As for the HTTP response, it is mainly composed of two parts:

• A status code (indicating the result of the request)
• A body (the data returned to the client)

How my HTTP Server works:

FOR more details, check my Medium here

What @me built:

• Multiplier management
• Validation of config file data after parsing
• Request validation
• Full HTTP response construction
• Request routing
• Methods (GET, POST, DELETE)
• Dynamic HTML generation based on error status codes
• Autoindex navigation page
• Testing

What @BusCops built:

• Parsing requests coming from the client browser
• CGI I/O handling

What @YbencheL built:

• Config file parsing
• Cookies and session management

Instructions

To run the web server, first compile the project using make. This will build the executable webserv, which requires a configuration file as an argument.

You can find example configuration files inside the config_files directory.

Available Make commands

• make
  Compiles all source files and generates the webserv executable.

• make clean
  Removes all object files.

• make fclean
  Removes all object files as well as the executable.

• make re
  Recompiles the entire project (equivalent to running make fclean followed by make).

Running the server

run this on the terminal: ./webserv <configuration_file>

Testing for leaks

run this on the terminal: valgrind --track-origins=yes ./webserv <configuration_file>

Resources

For this project, we relied on a combination of personal research and well-known documentation.

One of our teammates, yanflous, created a helpful resource that you can find here:
https://medium.com/@ma1loc/web-d78223b4573a

Since this project revolves around HTTP and web servers, there are many high-quality references available. Here are some of the most useful ones:

• Nginx documentation (configuration and behavior): https://nginx.org/en/docs/

AI Usage in the Project

AI tools were mainly used as a sort of an interactive documentation platfrom. They helped us better understand specific concepts, such as how certain components work and how they behave in different scenarios.

Additionally, AI was used for:

• Providing ideas for testing different parts of the project
• Assisting with grammar and wording improvements in this README

AI used as a support tool to enhance understanding and improve documentation quality.

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🧪 Testing

Local Stress Test

./stress-test

#	Method	URL	Notes
1	GET	http://localhost:8080/
2	POST	http://localhost:8080/	Body size: 0
3	HEAD	http://localhost:8080/
4	GET	http://localhost:8080/directory
5	GET	http://localhost:8080/directory/youpi.bad_extension
6	GET	http://localhost:8080/directory/youpi.bla
7	GET	http://localhost:8080/directory/oulalala	Expected 404
8	GET	http://localhost:8080/directory/nop
9	GET	http://localhost:8080/directory/nop/
10	GET	http://localhost:8080/directory/nop/other.pouic
11	GET	http://localhost:8080/directory/nop/other.pouac	Expected 404
12	GET	http://localhost:8080/directory/Yeah	Expected 404
13	GET	http://localhost:8080/directory/Yeah/not_happy.bad_extension
14	POST	http://localhost:8080/directory/youpi.bla	Body size: 100,000,000
15	POST	http://localhost:8080/directory/youpla.bla	Body size: 100,000,000
16	POST	http://localhost:8080/directory/youpi.bla	Body size: 100,000 · Special headers
17	POST	http://localhost:8080/post_body	Body size: 0
18	POST	http://localhost:8080/post_body	Body size: 100
19	POST	http://localhost:8080/post_body	Body size: 200
20	POST	http://localhost:8080/post_body	Body size: 101
21	GET	/	5 workers × 15 requests
22	GET	/	20 workers × 5,000 requests
23	GET	/directory/nop	128 workers × 50 requests
24	POST	/directory/youpi.bla	20 workers × 5 requests · Body size: 100,000,000

✅ All tests passed!

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Siege Benchmark

siege -c 255 -t 1s http://localhost:8080

Metric	Result
Availability	100.00%
Transactions	7,332 hits
Elapsed Time	1.97 s
Data Transferred	183.52 MB
Response Time	64.44 ms
Transaction Rate	3,721.83 trans/sec
Throughput	93.16 MB/sec
Concurrency	239.85
Successful Transactions	7,332
Failed Transactions	0
Longest Transaction	320.00 ms
Shortest Transaction	0.00 ms

Tested with 255 concurrent users over 1 second — zero failures recorded.