11

Challenge 11 - Write Your Own Web Server

This challenge corresponds to the eleventh part of the Coding Challenges series by John Crickett https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-webserver.

Description

The web server API implementation is inspired from (express)[https://www.npmjs.com/package/express]. The webserver is a basic implementation and a subpart of the express framework. It current handles only GET requests and supports responses and file responses. The webserver is able to handle the case when the callback to a GET function throws an error, by sending a 500 response.

• webserver.ts: Contains the implementation of the web server, implemented using the net module of Node.js. It exposes startServer, stopServer and get methods to start, stop and handle GET requests respectively.
• index.ts: A simple example of how to use the web server and serve a HTML file.
• request.ts: A simple implementation of the request object that is passed to the callback of the get method.
• status_codes.ts: Contains the supported status codes and their corresponding messages that are used in the response.

Usage

You can directly import the HttpServer class from the webserver.ts file and use it as follows:

import { HttpServer } from './webserver';

// Create a new instance of the HttpServer class with
const HOST = '127.0.0.1';
const PORT = 8000;
const debug = false;
const webServer = new HttpServer(HOST, PORT, debug);

// Handle GET requests
webServer.get('/', (req) => {
  res.send('Hello World!');
});

// Serve a HTML file
webServer.get('/index.html', (req) => {
  req.sendFile('path/to/index.html');
});

// Start the server
webServer.startServer();

Run tests

To run the tests for the webserver, go to the root directory of this repository and run the following command:

npm test src/11/