tiny_http

tiny_http is a fast, lightweight, easy-to-use, and embeddable HTTP server library in C99.

Hello, World! Example:

#include "th.h"

static th_err
handler(void* userp, const th_request* req, th_response* resp)
{
    th_set_body(resp, "Hello, World!");
    th_add_header(resp, "Content-Type", "text/plain");
    return TH_ERR_OK;
}

int main(void)
{
    th_server* server;
    th_server_create(&server, NULL);
    th_bind(server, "0.0.0.0", "8080", NULL);
    th_route(server, TH_METHOD_GET, "/", handler, NULL);
    while (1) {
        th_poll(server, 1000);
    }
    return 0;
}

Simply copy the code above to a file (e.g. hello.c) where you have the th.h and th.c files, and compile it with:

$ gcc -o hello hello.c th.c

Then run the server with:

$ ./hello

I wrote this library because I wanted a simple drop-in solution for the legacy C and C++ codebases I work with, hence the lack of dependencies and new language features. It is not designed to be a full-fledged web server, but rather a simple tool to build small web applications or to serve static files. No threading or forking is used.

Features

• Simple integration (just copy the th.h and th.c files to your project)
• HTTPS support (via OpenSSL)
• Path capturing (e.g. /user/{id})
• Supports Linux and MacOS (Windows support is planned)
• Fully customizable memory allocation and logging
• File Uploads (Multipart form data)
• Websockets

Dependencies

• The C standard library
• OpenSSL (optional, for HTTPS support)
• gperf (optional, for binary builds and amalgamation)
• python3 (optional, for running the amalgamation script)

Enabling HTTPS

To enable HTTPS support, you need to link against OpenSSL and set TH_WITH_SSL=1 when compiling the library.

$ gcc -o myserver myserver.c th.c -lssl -lcrypto -DTH_WITH_SSL=1

Pass the certificate and private key file paths to th_bind:

th_bind_opt opt = {
    .cert_file = "cert.pem", 
    .key_file = "key.pem",
};
th_bind(server, "0.0.0.0", "433", &opt);

Logging

Logging can be configured via the TH_LOG_LEVEL macro.

$ gcc -o myserver myserver.c th.c -DTH_LOG_LEVEL=TH_LOG_LEVEL_TRACE

Possible values are:

TH_LOG_LEVEL_NONE
TH_LOG_LEVEL_ERROR
TH_LOG_LEVEL_WARN
TH_LOG_LEVEL_INFO
TH_LOG_LEVEL_DEBUG
TH_LOG_LEVEL_TRACE

By default, tiny_http logs to stderr, but users can provide their own logging function (See examples/custom_logger.c).

Building binaries, examples, and tests

Library builds, examples, and tests can be built using CMake (This requires gperf to be installed).

$ mkdir build; cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make

More examples

Example - Path capturing:

#include "th.h"

static th_err
handler(void* userp, const th_request* req, th_response* resp)
{
    const char* msg = th_find_pathvar(req, "msg");
    th_printf_body(resp, "Hello, %s!", msg);
    th_add_header(resp, "Content-Type", "text/plain");
    return TH_ERR_OK;
}

int main(void)
{
    th_server* server;
    th_server_create(&server, NULL);
    th_bind(server, "0.0.0.0", "8080", NULL);
    th_route(server, TH_METHOD_GET, "/{msg}", handler, NULL);
    while (1) {
        th_poll(server, 1000);
    }
    return 0;
}

It's possible to specify a capture type by adding a colon before the parameter name: {string:param} (Default if nothing is specified), {int:param}, {path:param}.

Example - File serving:

#include "th.h"

static th_err
handle_path(void* userp, const th_request* req, th_response* resp)
{
    const char* path = th_find_pathvar(req, "path");
    th_set_body_from_file(resp, "root", path);
    return TH_ERR_OK;
}

static th_err
handle_index(void* userp, const th_request* req, th_response* resp)
{
    th_set_body_from_file(resp, "root", "index.html");
    return TH_ERR_OK;
}

int main(void)
{
    th_server* server;
    th_server_create(&server, NULL);
    th_bind(server, "0.0.0.0", "8080", NULL);
    th_add_dir(server, "root", "/path/to/your/files");
    th_route(server, TH_METHOD_GET, "/{path:path}", handle_path, NULL);
    th_route(server, TH_METHOD_GET, "/", handle_index, NULL);
    while (1) {
        th_poll(server, 1000);
    }
    return 0;
}

More detailed examples can be found in the examples directory.

Performance

Although tiny_http is not designed to be high-performance, it's still quite fast. Here is a comparison with Drogon (One of my favorite C++ web frameworks) on my cloud server (2 dedicated AMD Epyc vCPUs).

Notes:

• Drogon will, of course scale much better with more threads. This is just to give a rough idea of tiny_http's performance.
• The slower static file test is probably because of tiny_http not using sendfile on Linux yet.