HTTP server in C

Minimal example of a HTTP server using the POSIX sockets library, written in C.

I created this project simply to see how difficult it is to write a HTTP server using C. Would I recommend it? Unless it is a simple server, I would say... "no".

However I think that this repo is useful as a template for a modern C project that includes unit testing for test-driven development.

I organised this project with a more modern, yet minimal project structure; featuring unit testing using the lightweight library Unity.

To remain minimalistic, this project only uses Make for it's buildsystem. The makefile makes use of Make's "pattern rules" so that you don't need to individually include a file in both the runtime and unit-testing builds every time you add a new file to the project.

Dependencies

• A POSIX-compliant shell for commands used in makefile and get-dependencies.sh.
• Make for building the project.
• Git for downloading the external libraries used in the project.
• A POSIX-compliant C compiler (duh!) - edit makefile to call your compiler of choice.

First-Time Setup - Downloading External Libraries

1. Run get-dependencies.sh to download the external unit-testing library Unity. It will be extracted and saved to the lib/ directory.

Building

After that, all that is required is to run make in the root directory! The final executable will be saved in bin/.

To build the unit tests, run make test.

Server Behaviour

The server listens for a single endpoint at http://localhost:8080/readyz where it simply returns a 200 OK response.

If any other path is accessed on port 8080, the server returns 404 Not Found status.

TO-DO

• Write a client (in C, of course) that can make calls to the server.