A simple Web Server and Loadbalancer.

Inspired by Nignx.

Prerequisite

• linux
• gcc (v10+)
• make
• git

Build

To build first clone and then use make to build a stand alone application.

And the final binary will be in the ./bin directory.

$ git clone https://github.com/0x30c4/Basic-Web-Server-And-LoadBalancer-With-C.git 
$ cd Basic-Web-Server-And-LoadBalancer-With-C
$ make

Run

There are to modes the server can run.

Static Server.

Reverse Proxy and LoadBalancer.

Static Server.

First the static web server mode. For that you need to setup a conf file like this.

www_path: ./tests/test_files;
listen_port: 3344;
mime_file: ./mime.types;

The www_path is the static web servers root directory. listen_port is the servers listening port. And mime_file is for the Content-Type header. This files looks something like this.

text/html html htm shtml;
text/css css;
text/xml xml;
image/gif gif;
image/jpeg jpeg jpg;
application/javascript js;
application/atom+xml atom;
application/rss+xml rss;

As you can see the file contains Content-Type header and the corresponding file extension.

To run the server run.

./bin/server ./server.conf

Reverse Proxy and LoadBalancer.

Everything is almost like the static server but you need to add your backends like this

www_path: ./tests/test_files;
listen_port: 3344;
mime_file: ./mime.types;

backends_1: api_1.prod.local.net:8080;
backends_2: api_2.prod.local.net:8080;
backends_3: api_3.prod.local.net:8080;

backends_* is for specifying the backend with a host:port syntax. You can specify at most 10 backends.

And by default the server will loadbalance with the Round Robin.

To run the server run.

./bin/server ./server.conf

Error Handling.

By default the server will try to load error file from the www_path/error path

Docker

To run docker container just run.

$ docker-compose up

This will automatically build and run the server in a container.