# HTTP server
In order to become more familiar with web technologies and the
HTTP protocol, I built a web server using Rust. I went through 
several iterations before I arrived at the final product, which
currently hosts this website. My first prototype followed the 
web server [tutorial](https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch20-00-final-project-a-web-server.html)
in the official rust book. I expanded on the tutorial using the
Tokio async runtime and the tiny_http crate to build a rudimentary
web framework. It can serve static pages, rewrite faulty URLs, and
perform routing and redirects.
## Retirement
Maintaining a web server is a lot of work, and began to get in the way
of my other projects. After experimenting with several other web frameworks
like Axum and Bun, I decided to set up an Apache server instead. While this 
Rust server is no longer in use, I plan on returning to it at a later date
and using it to host another one of my websites. 
## What I learned
Through this process I learned about the life cycle of an HTTP request
and a TCP connection from the perspective of a web server. I now know
how to configure an SSL certificate, and integrate with a site with
Cloudflare. Now that I understand how a web server works at a low level, 
I am comfortable using higher level libraries which abstract these details
away.