A WORD OF WARNING

PLEASE ASSUME NOTHING IN THIS PROJECT WORKS

This is a personal "just for fun" / academic exercise project. No part of the code should be assumed to be working, well written, etc...!

ym-http

A simple http server written in python without using any of pythons existing http libraries

why?

I just wanted to try writing my own http server to learn more about the http protocol and about software development

usage

python main.py - Start the HTTP server using the configuration found at conf/ym-http.conf

python main.py [folder to be served] - Start the HTTP server delivering the given folder at /

Configuration

The configuration can be found at conf/ym-http.conf.

Basic syntax rules

• The configuration values themselves have to be separated with tabs and/or spaces (at least one, but they can be more if this makes your config looks nicer).
• Each configuration line has to be separated through a new line in the file
• The server uses a "first match" search, so if you configure the path / at the top nothing else will ever match
• empty lines and lines starting with # will be ignored

Configure folder/file delivery

A simple folder/file delivery can be configured using the line /[HTTP_PATH] [FOLDER_PATH] FS NO_AUTH. p.e:

/images     my_images/  FS  NO_AUTH
/           http/       FS  NO_AUTH

this config delivers the folder my_images at /images and the folder http at /

Configure Basic Auth

If you wish to enable basic auth, change the NO_AUTH to BASIC followed by an arrow of allowed basic auth header values (this will be replaced with hashes in the future). p.e:

BASIC [YWRtaW46YWRtaW4xMjM=, Z3Vlc3Q6Z3Vlc3Q=] to allow for admin:admin123 and guest:guest

DONE (features?)

• simple one line start to deliver a single directory
• simple configuration for more complex path/folder mappings
• basic auth, separately configurable for each mapping
• basic headers in response object (currently just Server and www-authenticated, but it's a start)
• url encoding (percent encoding), so the server url can contain encoded non-ascii characters

TODO (maybe)

Some things that would be fun to experiment with in the future:

• more robust http parsing and error handling (somewhat implemented)
• more robust handling of the tcp/ip socket (dynamic package sizes, streaming, etc...) (with GET supported)
• config files (simple 'deliver folder x at path y' for now, maybe a simple reverse proxy later, <static> <reverse>)
• threading
• Content-Type Header (how do you find out what encoding a file has, oh god)
• Range Header (useful when trying to download big files or for streaming video)
• support url parameters (? parameters should not be interpreted as file names)