This project implements a multithreaded HTTP server in Python using the socket API. It features a custom thread pool to efficiently handle client-server communication and supports basic HTTP methods like GET and HEAD (but it doesn't support POST). This project helped me see how HTTP works at a fundamental level — and it was a really fun learning experience!
One little expierement I did was to configure my home router to forward HTTP requests to my laptop (the server) using a port mapping, to bypass NAT protocol, thus allowing anyone in the internet to access the server.
- Serves static files: Serves static files (e.g., HTML, CSS, JS, images) and generates directory listings dynamically (inspired by Apache server behavior).
- Multithreading with a Custom Thread Pool:
- Implements a thread pool using semaphores based on the producer-consumer pattern.
- Manages concurrent client requests.
- Supported HTTP Methods: Supports
GETandHEADrequests with proper handling of unsupported methods. - Logging:
- Logs client requests, server responses, and errors.
- Active Connection Monitoring:
- Uses a simple thread-safe counter to track and display the number of active connections in real time.
- You can easily run the python script to run the server, you can optionally change the port number.
- to try it, you can use your browser for testing, by entering some thing like "localhost/index.html" as url
- I've wrote a simple client script to use for testing,
client.py, which is like a simpler version of thecurlcommand - to try it, type in the command line
python client.py GET localhost 80 /index.html