HACKER Q&A
📣 austin-cheney

What do you want in a web server?


For personal use I am writing a web server from the ground up based not on HTTP but on streaming sockets. It provides both HTTP and WebSocket support from a single port, a proxy, redirection for both domains and resources. All configurations are supplied through a tiny JSON file. It also provides support for TLS, localhost certificate generation and TLS proxies. Because it’s a streaming sockets first server it can easily proxy anything, including multi gigabit media, directly to the browser or other servers.

What native features would you or other people want that:

* Are missing from other web servers

* Are too painful to implement

* Are too slow or incomplete in other servers

Are there file system features/content or file execution capabilities that are missing or poorly implemented in other web servers that you would like?

  👤 ActorNightly Accepted Answer ✓
I would like an all in one solution, single file, that is prod ready, with a key/value datastore. In terms of the projects I have done, there is a significant amount of work to set up actual web server, solely to have access to a backend logic which relies on some database.

So the idea behind this is that I can provision an cloud instance, set up the DNS link, drop the front end assets + configuration json+server file in a directory, and run the file and it should work without any big setup, with a given advantage that I can have

Generally, it should have a key/value store endpoint, which is backed by an in memory cache (set to a certain size) + disk offload, as well as ability to add to the database using JSON files.

Also, in the config json, it can be possible to specify a command to be run (in the spirit of the CGI frameworks), for a given endpoint with provided data.

It would be also nice to have integrated user auth. Im thinking that it auto injects JS code for the index.html page that creates a modal for either logging in or registering a new user, activated when someone clicks on a link, and then there would be a separate folder for "authorized" view pages that I can be viewed with the set cookie from the modal.

👤 cookiengineer
A lot of the things you described sound like caddy? [1]

[1] https://caddyserver.com/

👤 bubblebeard
A simple way to restrict resources would be nice. I’m only familiar with Nginx and Apache and while resource restriction is possible with both I feel it could be simplified.

Would be nice if you could restrict resources with individual passwords too.

👤 n3storm
Nginx maps feel wrong to me.

Bot and agent blacklisting and country blocking is pain in the ass.

Simple Variable Usage both environment or json/config ones and Configuration Includes will help a lot.

👤 coreyp_1
Which language? Curious b/c I was going to do the same in C and have several ideas.
👤 carlosjobim
A Graphical User Interface.