A C++ library implementing an asynchronous HTTP server and client.

To clone this library, make sure you also clone the submodules. The --recursive flag should do this for you:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/ef-gy/cxxhttp.git

You must have a GNU make and a C++ compiler that supports C++14. On most modern-ish Linux distributions that's pretty easy: just update your PMS and install clang++ or g++. Preferrably clang++. No reason.

On OSX, you'll be fine if you just install a current version of XCode.

On Ubuntu, you're in for a bit of a rough ride. The only reliable way I've found of getting things to compile, at least on 14.04, is to install this PPA and use g++ 4.9:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install g++-4.9

To compile things, add CXX=g++-4.9 to your make commands, like this:

make test CXX=g++-4.9

This may not be necessary if you haven't installed clang++ and if there's no other versions of g++ installed. clang++ doesn't work on Ubuntu in c++14 mode, because libc++ hasn't been updated past an ancient SVN snapshot.

On Debian and Raspbian it should be sufficient to just update your package sources and install clang++ and libc++:

apt-get update
apt-get install clang++ libc++1 libc++-dev

The library has a test suite, which you can run like this:

make test

If this fails, something is wrong. Please open an issue at GitHub with the log: https://github.com/ef-gy/cxxhttp/issues

This library uses the ASIO asynchronous I/O headers as well as libefgy. If you are starting a new project, it's probably easiest to use the build headers from libefgy and git submodules to pull in the dependencies.

The following set of commands ought to get you started:

PROJECT=funtastic-example
git init ${PROJECT}
cd ${PROJECT}
git submodule add https://github.com/ef-gy/libefgy.git dependencies/libefgy
git submodule add https://github.com/chriskohlhoff/asio.git dependencies/asio
git submodule add https://github.com/ef-gy/cxxhttp.git dependencies/cxxhttp
mkdir include
mkdir include/${PROJECT}
mkdir src
ln -s ../dependencies/asio/asio/include/asio include/asio
ln -s ../dependencies/asio/asio/include/asio.hpp include/asio.hpp
ln -s ../dependencies/cxxhttp/include/cxxhttp include/cxxhttp
ln -s ../dependencies/libefgy/include/ef.gy include/ef.gy

A trivial makefile to get you started would look like this:

-include ef.gy/base.mk include/ef.gy/base.mk
NAME:=funtastic-example

A very trivial sample server would be this (see src/server.cpp):

#define ASIO_DISABLE_THREADS
#include <cxxhttp/httpd.h>
using namespace cxxhttp;

static void hello(http::sessionData &session, std::smatch &) {
  session.reply(200, "Hello World!");
}

static http::servlet servlet("/", ::hello);

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { return cxxhttp::main(argc, argv); }

If you saved this as src/example.cpp, then you could run it like this:

make example
./example http:localhost:8080

This will run the server and to see what it does, use:

curl -i http://localhost:8080/

Which should print the "Hello World!" from above, and you'll notice that your example server printed a "GET /" access log line.

You can run the ./example programme without arguments to see all the available command line options. In particular, there is "http:unix:...", which lets you run your server on a UNIX socket.

See src/server.cpp for additional commentary, and the include/cxxhttp/httpd-....h headers, which implement additional common features that web servers tend to have.

Sure, try this:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/ef-gy/cxxhttp-example.git

Note the --recursive - that's because this is using submodules.

You really should be running this behind a real web servers, for security and such. Look into nginx for that, which is really good at forward-proxying.

The command you're looking for is built into git:

git submodule update --recursive --remote

Don't forget to commit the new state of the dependencies/ directory, if any of the libraries had updates.