Being largely unfamiliar with C, I would prefer conceptual resources over source code. The why is more important than the how. Hopefully that makes sense?
conceptually things are pretty limited - this is really simple if you are just playing around, and are just doing http 1
o bind a socket
o manage incoming connections
o parse http headers
o 'routing' - demultiplex handlers based on URL
o encode response
unless its a little embedded thing one usually uses some kind of select/epoll machinery to multiplex the work on each channel. I guess thread-per-request is another model that works at moderate connection counts.
it helps to have some decent way of representing the header to send to the handler, C doesn't really have a great story here
I think the only funky thing is dealing with all the various body modes. so you will need to make some kind of protocol to deal with handlers and incremental updates if that's a thing for your use case.
I would just do the normal thing, read the rfc and spit out a couple hundred lines that talks to your browser...and then decide where if anywhere you need to go from there
I'm specifically interested in compressing my analytics stack. I'm currently interacting with HTTP Messages at a higher level. The problem, as I see it, is the webserver is already doing this work but without useful output. I'd like to implement my analytics paradigm natively at the webserver level.
for some applications it really might be easier to write a little thing than integrate into some giant framework. and I do think that building these things really helps one understand what's going on in all those layers
but I have to agree about C. unless the whole point is to ingrate with some existing codebase, there are several language choices which should turn this from a day or two of work to an hour or two - with a more robust outcome
I want to consume HTTP headers at the lowest possible level. The webserver would output a custom log file for direct consumption.
There are certainly off the shelf options, but I enjoy reinventing the wheel and dislike dependencies. I'd like to use C because I have interest in OS level webservers.
I would probably go for rust over c if the only reason for c is "os level". But either way, this is for requests from "real" http clients, eg: web browsers? Presumably you're already "trapped" at a pretty high level, like tls, http/2 etc?
Otoh, if low level is what you want, maybe look at:
