HTTP Server in C

A minimal HTTP/1.1 server built from scratch in C using raw TCP sockets. No libraries, no frameworks — just the standard POSIX socket API.

Features

• Raw TCP socket setup via getaddrinfo, bind, listen, accept
• HTTP/1.1 request parsing (method, path, version, headers)
• Multithreaded connection handling with pthreads (one thread per connection)
• Static file serving with correct MIME types
• URL routing with redirect support
• Sec-Fetch-Dest header detection to distinguish direct user navigation from page-initiated asset requests
• Chunked file streaming — files are sent in 64KB chunks, so large files don't load into memory
• Accept-Ranges: bytes support for video buffering

Supported MIME Types

Images: png, jpg, gif, svg
Video: mp4, webm, ogg
Web: html, css, js

Project Structure

pages/          HTML and CSS pages served by the server
pages/assets/   Static assets (images, video, etc.)
server.c        Server source
run.sh          Build and run script

Running

./run.sh

Then open http://localhost:8080/home in your browser.

Requires gcc and pthreads. Linux and macOS only — Windows uses a different socket API (Winsock) and is not supported.

Adding Pages

Drop an HTML file in pages/ — a file at pages/about.html is automatically served at /about. Any unknown route redirects to /help.

Assets referenced in HTML (CSS, images, video) should go in pages/assets/ and be referenced as /assets/filename.

Known Limitations

• HTTP Range requests are not fully implemented — video seeking works within the buffered portion but jumping to unbuffered sections of large files will restart from the beginning
• HTTP only, no TLS