andws

Another Dumb Web Server 0.005

Really Dumb

This isn't the sort of thing I would ever expect anyone to use, but it demonstrates what can be done in some simple Perl. It's not rigorous (you could easily confuse it) or RFC compliant in any way.

What is it?

It's another simple "run in place" web server.

Usage

Basic usage from your shell

> cd "${directory_i_want_to_serve}"
> andws

Browse the files in that folder at
http://localhost:1444

Press ^C and then download a better server, such as Caddy.

From within perl, itself

You can also override some of the defaults from within perl:

use And::WebServer;

my $server = And::WebServer->new({ port => 23412, document_root => '/tmp' });

So many broken things

• Refactoring to have more classes, e.g. for files, response and headers.
• Inline HTML looks like code from the late 90s. It's not even valid HTML.
• It uses Internal Server Error when it should not. (e.g. permissions).
• It contains the obvious security flaw that it doesn't use realpath(3), canonicalize_file_name(3), System.IO.GetFullPathName, or whatever. However, by accident (rather than design) it seems to do the right thing, but it should do proper checking.
• It follows symlinks and there's no option to turn it off. That's another well-known security issue.
• It only runs on UNIX.
• It doesn't support certain non-standard file types (e.g Solaris doors should be displayed as D).
• It probably doesn't allow for concurrent sessions.
• sticky-bits not displayed.
• Content-Length and Transfer-Encoding: chunked are missing.
• There is a remarkable lack of unit tests.
• Or any tests.
• Error checking is distinctly lacking.
• It's fragile: as it doesn't recover from certain errors: it just dies (and that's not from me calling die(), either - I don't call it).

(Pull requests welcome.)

Author, Copyright

Copyright Ⓒ 2017 Nicolas Doye

License

Apache License, Version 2.0