microhttpc

A minimal and educational HTTP web framework written in pure C using POSIX sockets.

It provides a simple foundation for building web servers and handling routing, from managing raw TCP connections to parsing HTTP requests and generating responses.

Inspired by the simplicity of Go’s net/http package.

I`ll be glad to any ideas or contributions — feel free to open an issue or PR!

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Example

#include "http.h"

void simple_handler(response *resp, request *req){
    resp->status_code = HTTP_STATUS_OK;

    if (strcmp(req->uri, "/home") == 0) {
        int fd = open("index.html", O_RDONLY);
        ssize_t n = read_all(fd, resp->body, sizeof(resp->body));
        close(fd);

        add_header(&resp->headers, "Content-Type", "text/html");
        char len_buf[32];
        sprintf(len_buf, "%zd", n);
        add_header(&resp->headers, "Content-Length", len_buf);
    }else{
        send_404(resp, req);
    }
}

int main(){
    listen_and_serve("localhost:8080", simple_handler);
}

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How It Works

microhttpc provides:

• A blocking TCP server using accept() and pthread for concurrency.
• A simple HTTP/1.1 parser that fills a request struct with the method, URI, headers, and body.
• A lightweight header map for O(1) lookups.
• A handle_func callback that receives both request *req and response *resp.
  Inside the handler, you fill the response — set status_code, add headers, and write the body.
  The framework automatically serializes and sends it back to the client.
• Built-in helpers like send_404(), send_file(), and send_500().
• Optional Keep-Alive and per-connection read timeouts.

No external dependencies — just pure C and POSIX.

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Goals

• Build a basic TCP server from scratch
• Handle multiple clients using fork()
• Implement HTTP/1.1 request parsing
• Implement persistent connections (Keep-Alive)
• Add MIME type detection
• Implement HTTP response helpers

void send_404(response *r);
void send_500(response *r);
void send_file(response *r, const char *path);

• Improve headers convenience
• Add routing system
• Add logging and configuration
• Graceful shutdown (SIGINT)
• Explore multithreading with pthread