Before nginx was a thing, I worked with a guy who forked apache httpd and wrote this blog in C, like, literally embedded html and css inside the server, so when he made a tpyo or was adding another post he had to recompile the source code. The performance was out of this world.
This reminds me of one of my older projects. I wanted to learn more about network communications, so I started working on a simple P2P chat app. It wasn’t anything fancy, but I really enjoyed working on it. One challenge I faced was that, at the time, I didn’t know how to listen for user input while handling network communication simultaneously. So, after I had managed to get multiple TCP sockets working on one thread, I thought, why not open another socket for HTTP communication? That way, I could incorporate a fancy web UI instead of just a CLI interface.
So, I wrote a simple HTTP server, which, in hindsight, might not have been necessary.
my website’s backend is made with bash, it calls make for every request and it probably has hundreds of remote arbitrary code execution bugs that will get me pwned someday, it’s great
edit: to clarify, it uses a rust program i made to expose the bash scripts as http endpoints, i’m not crazy enough to implement http in bash
it behaves like a static file server, but if a file has the others-execute permission bit set it executes the file instead of reading it
it’s surprisingly nice for prototyping since you can just write a cli program and it’s automatically available over http too
I know about the CGI standard, but mine does things a little differently (executable files don’t just render pages but also handle logging, access control, etc. when put in special positions within a directory), so I still think it was worth the afternoon i spent making it.
i thought it was neat how php lets you write your website’s logic with the same directory tree pattern that clients consume it from, but i didn’t want to learn php so i made my own, worse version
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