tiny-http-dh

Tiny but strong HTTP server in Rust. Its main objectives are to be 100% compliant with the HTTP standard and to provide an easy way to create an HTTP server.

About this fork

tiny-http-dh is dheijl's maintained fork of the original tiny-http, which is no longer actively maintained. See CHANGELOG.md for what has diverged from upstream (CVE fixes, a configurable worker thread pool, Rust 2024 edition, dependency updates, etc.).

What does tiny-http handle?

• Accepting and managing connections to the clients
• Parsing requests
• Requests pipelining
• HTTPS (using either OpenSSL, Rustls or native-tls)
• Transfer-Encoding and Content-Encoding
• Turning user input (eg. POST input) into a contiguous UTF-8 string (not implemented yet)
• Ranges (not implemented yet)
• Connection: upgrade (used by websockets)

Tiny-http handles everything that is related to client connections and data transfers and encoding.

Everything else (parsing the values of the headers, multipart data, routing, etags, cache-control, HTML templates, etc.) must be handled by your code. If you want to create a website in Rust, I strongly recommend using a framework instead of this library.

Installation

Add this to the Cargo.toml file of your project:

[dependencies]
tiny_http_dh = "0.12.2"

Usage

use tiny_http_dh::{Server, Response};

let server = Server::http("0.0.0.0:8000").unwrap();

for request in server.incoming_requests() {
    println!("received request! method: {:?}, url: {:?}, headers: {:?}",
        request.method(),
        request.url(),
        request.headers()
    );

    let response = Response::from_string("hello world");
    request.respond(response);
}

You can refer to the original tiny-http docs for more details.

Worker thread pool configuration

The existing API is unchanged, but there are 3 new tiny_http_dh methods that take a PoolConfig parameter: Server::http_with_pool/Server::https_with_pool/Server::http_unix_with_pool, in addition to the original Server::http/Server::https/Server::http_unix.

use tiny_http_dh::{PoolConfig, Server};

let server = Server::http_with_pool(
    "0.0.0.0:8000",
    PoolConfig {
        min_threads: 4,
        max_threads: 32,
        max_queue: 128,
    },
).unwrap();

PoolConfig also implements Default (min_threads: 4, max_threads: 64, max_queue: 256), so you can start from that and only override what you need:

let server = Server::http_with_pool(
    "0.0.0.0:8000",
    PoolConfig { max_threads: 32, ..Default::default() },
).unwrap();

Once max_threads is reached, further connections are queued; once max_queue is also reached, new connections are dropped rather than queued without bound. Size max_queue for the burst traffic you expect.

Speed

Tiny-http was designed with speed in mind:

• Each client connection will be dispatched to a thread pool. Each thread will handle one client. If there is no thread available when a client connects, a new one is created. Threads that are idle for a long time (currently 5 seconds) will automatically die.
• If multiple requests from the same client are being pipelined (ie. multiple requests are sent without waiting for the answer), tiny-http will read them all at once and they will all be available via server.recv(). Tiny-http will automatically rearrange the responses so that they are sent in the right order.
• One exception to the previous statement exists when a request has a large body (currently > 1kB), in which case the request handler will read the body directly from the stream and tiny-http will wait for it to be read before processing the next request. Tiny-http will never wait for a request to be answered to read the next one.
• When a client connection has sent its last request (by sending Connection: close header), the thread will immediately stop reading from this client and can be reclaimed, even when the request has not yet been answered. The reading part of the socket will also be immediately closed.
• Decoding the client's request is done lazily. If you don't read the request's body, it will not be decoded.

Examples

The examples directory contains runnable examples covering common use cases, e.g.:

cargo run --example hello-world
cargo run --example serve-root
cargo run --example ssl --features ssl-openssl

• hello-world.rs - Minimal multi-threaded server
• serve-root.rs - Serving static files from a directory
• ssl.rs - HTTPS using one of the ssl-* features
• websockets.rs - Connection: upgrade / websockets
• php-cgi.rs - Proxying requests to a PHP-CGI script

Projects using the original upstream tiny_http crate (not this fork):

• heroku-tiny-http-hello-world - A simple web application demonstrating how to deploy tiny-http to Heroku
• crate-deps - A web service that generates images of dependency graphs for crates hosted on crates.io
• rouille - Web framework built on tiny-http

License

This project is licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in tiny-http by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.