🛠️ Low-Level HTTP/HTTPS Server

A from-scratch HTTP/HTTPS server framework in TypeScript, built using raw TCP/TLS sockets — no http, https, or Express. This project was created to deeply understand the internals of how an HTTP server works at the protocol level.

🎯 Purpose

The main goal is to understand what’s going on behind high-level frameworks by:

• Manually handling socket connections
• Parsing HTTP requests and building HTTP responses
• Implementing real-world HTTP/1.1 features myself
• Seeing how middleware, routing, compression, static file serving, and security (CORS, HTTPS) actually work under the hood

✨ Features Implemented

• Core Networking

  • Raw TCP (HTTP) and TLS (HTTPS) servers
  • HTTP/1.1 parser: method, path, version, headers, query, body
  • Keep-Alive support

• Routing & Middleware

  • Simple addRoute(method, path, handler) API
  • Middleware pipeline (use())
  • 404 (Not Found) and 405 (Method Not Allowed) with Allow header
  • Global error handler with JSON error responses

• Request Parsing

  • JSON, text, form body parsing
  • Chunked transfer decoding (with size limits → 413 Payload Too Large)
  • Cookie parsing (req.cookies)

• Static File Serving

  • ETag, Last-Modified, Cache-Control headers
  • 304 Not Modified support
  • MIME type detection
  • Directory traversal protection

• Compression

  • Gzip and Brotli compression
  • Configurable thresholds

• Security

  • CORS middleware with allowed origins/methods/headers
  • HTTPS dev cert auto-generation & trust (macOS, Windows auto-trust, Linux manual steps)

⚙️ Installation

git clone https://github.com/AviSharmaaa/http-server.git
cd http-server
npm install
npm run build

Start HTTP:

npm run start:http

Start HTTPS (auto-generates trusted dev cert):

npm run start:https

🧪 Example Route

import { addRoute } from "./router/router";

addRoute("GET", "/hello", () => ({
  statusCode: 200,
  body: "Hello from HTTPS server!"
}));

🔍 Test It

curl -v http://localhost:8080/hello
curl -vk https://localhost:8443/hello

📜 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.