63 lines
2.8 KiB
HTML
63 lines
2.8 KiB
HTML
<Container>
|
|
<header class="header">
|
|
<h1> Rust HTTP Server <GithubIcon href="https://github.com/Xterminate1818/server"/></h1>
|
|
<h2> Keywords: Back End - TCP - SSL </h2>
|
|
</header>
|
|
<div class="content">
|
|
<h2 class="distinct"> Motivation </h2>
|
|
As a systems programmer, I want to understand the technologies
|
|
I use at a very low level. Modern web stacks abstract away the
|
|
process of handling TCP connections, serving SSL certificates,
|
|
and parsing HTTP requests. The best way to understand a technology
|
|
is to implement it from the ground up, I studied the HTTP 1.1
|
|
specification and wrote a server to host my website.
|
|
<h2 class="distinct"> Approach </h2>
|
|
At the most basic level, the server will translate the request URL
|
|
into a local file path, and respond with the file matching that path
|
|
if it exists. Request URLs are sanitized to prevent accessing files
|
|
outside of the server's directory. Two tables are used for rewriting
|
|
and routing URLs. This makes handling URLs predictable and robust.
|
|
<@code lang="rust">
|
|
// Snippet from the request handling code
|
|
pub async fn construct_response(&self, request_url: &str) -> Response {
|
|
let sanitized_url = rewrite_url(request_url);
|
|
if sanitized_url != request_url {
|
|
return Self::redirect(&sanitized_url);
|
|
}
|
|
|
|
let routed_url = self.perform_routing(&sanitized_url).await;
|
|
if let Some(response) =
|
|
self.perform_redirecting(&routed_url).await {
|
|
return response;
|
|
}
|
|
match self.get_resource(&routed_url).await {
|
|
Some(bytes) => Response::from_data(bytes),
|
|
None => Self::not_found(),
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
</@code>
|
|
I use Cloudflare to manage my domain name, DNS records, and SSL certificates.
|
|
Cloudflare automatically caches resources, rewrites HTTP requests to HTTPS,
|
|
and limits request sizes. This allows my server to only listen on port 443
|
|
and neglect caching server-side.
|
|
<h2 class="distinct"> Dependencies </h2>
|
|
My goal with this project was to provide a functional server using as few
|
|
libraries as possible. The final project directly depends on four crates:
|
|
<@code lang=toml>
|
|
// Snippet from Cargo.toml
|
|
[dependencies]
|
|
log = "0.4"
|
|
log4rs = "1.3"
|
|
tiny_http = "0.12"
|
|
tokio = {version = "1", features = ["full"]}
|
|
</@code>
|
|
The first two crates, log and log4rs, provide logging functions which aren't critical to the
|
|
server's functionality. The tiny_http crate provides a simple wrapper for the standard
|
|
library TCP stream, and performs SSL encryption. It is used as the backbone
|
|
for many Rust web frameworks. While I could implement these features myself, I
|
|
decided against it for security and browser compatibility reasons. Finally there is
|
|
tokio, an async runtime. This is necessary because Rust does not provide a runtime
|
|
by default, and building one is out of scope.
|
|
</div>
|
|
</Container>
|