Content-type: text/html Man page of corehttp

corehttp

Section: Environments, Tables, and Troff Macros (7)
Updated: 5 Aug 2005
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NAME

corehttp - single-process non-forking-blocking-threading http server

SYNOPSIS

corehttp configfile

DESCRIPTION

corehttp is a web server which provides basic HTTP/1.0 support and does all it's work from within one process. It never forks (except to serve dynamic content) and it does not use pthreads. corehttp does all of this by using a select() server model where all sockets are set to non-blocking so we can cycle through every socket fast, filling each socket's I/O demands evenly. Features include

*: Efficient processing model and good concurrency performance.
*: Passable HTTP/1.0 support.
*: Basic CGI support, though passing URL-encoded variables is sketchy.
*: Easily extensible but hard to understand at first.
*: Directory listings, root web directory, logging, configuration file.

USAGE

To install corehttp, simply run make in the src/ directory

        make all                # Makes everything
        make install            # Installs files to path
        make clean              # Removes local objects and executables
        make uninstall          # Removes installed files

If you wish to have dynamic content support you will also need to have the PHP - command line interpretor and Perl interpretor installed on your system, or any other binary defined in the config file. Currently, CGI isn't recommended because CoreHTTP must fork each time a CGI page is requested. This should be fixed in the future with CoreHTTP pre-forking a few processes to handle dynamic content.

Using corehttp is simple once the config file is set up. Simply supply the relative path to the config file as the only argument to corehttp.

        Example:
        corehttp chttp.conf

The included config file in the distribution is named chttp.conf and is located in the top level of the corehttp folder.

CONFIGURATION

The configuration file will now be described. The format is simple and the included file has all the possible settings corehttp has to offer. Here are some bullet points:

# comment: The hash mark denotes a comment. Anything on the current line beyond this is ignored.
TIMEOUT seconds: How long until we drop an idle client.
BACKLOG numPending: This is the listening socket backlog. See man 2 listen for more information.
DEFPAGE filename: You may have more than one of these. The first DEFPAGE we see in the config file is the "first" default filename we check for in a directory. The second is the second, and so on. A common setup would be:

        DEFPAGE index.php
        DEFPAGE index.pl
        DEFPAGE index.html
        DEFPAGE index.htm

PORT portno: Just like DEFPAGE you may have more than one of these. This is the port that the server listens on. The web port is 80.
ROOTDIR absoluteWebPath: This should be entered as an absolute path and should be the root web directory. In other words, when someone types in www.yourdomain.com they should view the index page within this directory.
LOGFILE absoluteLogFilePath: This should contain the absolute path to the file corehttp will write its log to. Make sure whatever user you run corehttp with has write access to this file.
PAGE404 absolute404errorFilePath: This should contain the absolute path to the page the server serves up when it can't find a file.
CGIEXT/CGIBIN: These two are meant to be used together, with CGIEXT being the file extension and CGIBIN being the binary called. Multiple instances of this may be used. Just keep the EXT/BINs in order. You can alternate them or do all BIN's and then all EXTs if you want. For example, if /usr/bin/perl is the binary and *.pl is the extension:

        CGIBIN  "/usr/bin/perl"
        CGIEXT  "pl"

CONTENTEXT/CONTENTTYPE: Similarly used like CGIEXT and CGIBIN, except these denote what is sent in the Content-type field in the HTTP header.
UNKNOWNTYPE: The Content-type to return for a file with an unknown extension or none at all.
DIRLIST dirlistScriptPath: The location of the script that is suppost to take an absolute directory as an argument and print out an html directory list.

All you do is stick one of these bullet things on a separate line starting at the beginning of a line in some file. Simple. There are also a few more compile options present in common.c and common.h and these files must be modified before compiling. These options are just buffer sizes. The reason they are not changeable is that they are hard coded free memory spaces within the program itself.

BUFSIZE: The largest buffer - this is used for sending and receiving chunks of data and storing HTTP headers.
PATHSIZE: This is the utility size - used for things like storing URLs and filenames.
SETSIZE: The smallest buffer - this is how many multiplexed ports may be present and how many default page names there are.

TROUBLESHOOTING

There are some common problems associated with running a server. A look at the log file is the first step to take. Here are some possible problems:

Segmentation fault!: Uh oh, this server is still nascent and if this happens send me a line and the config file or the log if it was running.
Bad config file: Maybe the config file parsing is buggy, maybe not. It should output what it read before it exits, so see if you can use that to help.
Couldn't bind with server socket!: If you terminate an application that was bound to a port and attempt to start another application that uses the same port in a small margin of time, the OS won't let you because of a TCP feature. Just wait a minute or two and try again. If this doesn't work, make sure you have admin privaliges if you are trying a port less than 1024.
My log file has PROBLEMS everywhere!: That's okay. They're more like things that just happen, like when a client bails out of a large file transfer.

AUTHOR

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 05:53:33 GMT, August 04, 2007