Simple Web Server

A lightweight C++ web server built to explore low-level networking, HTTP request handling, multithreading, and concurrent client connections.

This project uses POSIX sockets directly instead of a web framework, making the request/response flow easy to inspect and extend.

Features

• TCP socket setup with socket, bind, listen, and accept
• Basic HTTP/1.1 responses with status line, headers, and body
• One detached worker thread per client connection
• Simple health-check route for smoke testing
• Small Makefile-based build with no external dependencies

Requirements

• Linux or another POSIX-like environment with socket APIs
• g++ with C++17 support
• make

Build

make

This creates a server executable in the project root.

Run

./server

By default, the server listens on:

http://0.0.0.0:8080

From the same machine, use 127.0.0.1 in your browser or curl:

curl http://127.0.0.1:8080/

Routes

Method	Path	Response
GET	/	Small HTML page
GET	/health	OK
GET	anything else	404 Not Found

Project Structure

.
|-- Makefile
|-- README.md
|-- http_tcpServer.cpp
|-- http_tcpServer.h
`-- server.cpp

• server.cpp creates the server and starts the listen loop.
• http_tcpServer.h declares the http::TcpServer API.
• http_tcpServer.cpp contains the socket setup, client handling, and HTTP response generation.

Clean Build Artifacts

make clean

Notes

This is an educational server, not a production HTTP implementation. It intentionally keeps parsing, routing, and thread management simple so the networking mechanics stay visible.