Kirk Haines

khaines@engineyard.com

RailsConf 2016

Let's Build a Web Server!

https://github.com/engineyard/railsconf2016-webservers

Kirk Haines

• Rubyist since 2001

• First professional Ruby web app in 2002

• Dozens of sites and apps, and several web servers since

• Engine Yard since 2008

• Former Ruby 1.8.6 maintainer

khaines@engineyard.com

@wyhaines

What Is a Web Server?

A web server is an information technology that processes requests via HTTP, the basic network protocol used to distribute information on the World Wide Web.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_server

A web server is just a server that accepts HTTP requests, and returns HTTP responses.

In The Beginning...

Tim Berners-Lee, of CERN
Information sharing between scientists
Original web browser and web server implementations
NeXT and Apple Macintosh - 50€ / server
Source code - 50€ / site
Open sourced on April 30, 1993

What Does It Look Like?

HTTP

HyperText Transfer Protocol

Defines:

How to make a request to a HTTP server (a web server)

How the server should respond to requests

Very Simple Beginnings

Request a document

GET document-path

Valid response was simply to return the document.

"A Shell Server for HTTP"

(slightly modified from the original)

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Provider/ShellScript.html

#! /bin/sh
read get docid junk
cat `echo "$docid"` | \
  ruby -p -e '$_.gsub(/^\/ [\r\n]/,"").chomp'

Run the Server

Access the Server

That's Terrifying

i.e. Don't Actually Do This

(super_simple.sh)

A (scary, limited) web server!

This is easy!!!

#! /bin/sh
read get docid junk
cat `echo "$docid" | \
  ruby -p -e '$_.gsub!(/^\/ [\r\n]/,"").chomp'`

netcat -l -p 5000 -e ./super_simple.sh

That Original Server...

Text

    for (;;) {
        status = read(soc, command, COMMAND_SIZE);
        if (status<=0) {
            if (TRACE) printf("read returned %i, errno=%i\n", status, errno);
            return status;      /* Return and close file */
        }
        command[status]=0;      /* terminate the string */
#ifdef VM
        {
            char * p;
            for (p=command; *p; p++) {
                *p = FROMASCII(*p);
                if (*p == '\n') *p = ' ';
            }
        }
#endif
        if (TRACE) printf("read string is `%s'\n", command);

        arg=index(command,' ');
        if (arg) {
            *arg++ = 0;                         /* Terminate command & move on */
            arg = strip(arg);                   /* Strip leading & trailing space */
            if (0==strcmp("GET", command)) {    /* Get a file                   */

/*      Remove host and any punctuation. (Could use HTParse to remove access too @)
*/
                filename = arg;
                if (arg[0]=='/') {
                    if (arg[1]=='/') {
                        filename = index(arg+2, '/');   /* Skip //host/ */
                        if (!filename) filename=arg+strlen(arg);
                    } else {
                        filename = arg+1;               /* Assume root: skip slash */
                    }
                }

                if (*filename) {                /* (else return test message)   */
                    keywords=index(filename, '?');
                    if (keywords) *keywords++=0;        /* Split into two */

https://github.com/NotTheRealTimBL/WWWDaemon/blob/master/old/V0.1/daemon.c#L214

Monolithic Early Versions

/*              TCP/IP based server for HyperText                       TCPServer.c
**              ---------------------------------
**
**  History:
**      2 Oct 90        Written TBL. Include filenames for VM from RTB.
*/

It's a file, daemon.c, that changed the direction of the internet forever.

https://github.com/NotTheRealTimBL/WWWDaemon/blob/master/old/V0.1/daemon.c#L214

By Open Source Release, Better Organized

Anchor.h		HTFTP.h			HTStyle.h		HyperAccess.h
NewsAccess.m		TextToy.m               Anchor.m		HTFile.c
HTStyle.m		HyperAccess.m		ParseHTML.h		WWW.h
FileAccess.h		HTFile.h		HTTCP.c			HyperManager.h
StyleToy.h		WWWPageLayout.h         FileAccess.m		HTParse.c
HTTCP.h			HyperManager.m		StyleToy.m		WWWPageLayout.m
HTAccess.c		HTParse.h		HTTP.c			HyperText.h
TcpAccess.h		WorldWideWeb_main.m     HTAccess.h		HTString.c
HTTP.h			HyperText.m		TcpAccess.m		tcp.h
HTFTP.c			HTString.h		HTUtils.h		NewsAccess.h
TextToy.h

This code set the stage for the internet as we know it.

Just Because....

/*              TCP/IP based server for HyperText               HTDaemon.c
**              ---------------------------------
**
**
** Compilation options:
**      RULES           If defined, use rule file and translation table
**      DIR_OPTIONS     If defined, -d options control directory access
**
**  Authors:
**      TBL     Tim Berners-Lee, CERN
**      JFG     Jean-Francois Groff, CERN
**      JS      Jonathan Streets, FNAL
**
**  History:
**         Sep 91  TBL  Made from earlier daemon files. (TBL)
**      26 Feb 92  JFG  Bug fixes for Multinet.
**       8 Jun 92  TBL  Bug fix: Perform multiple reads in case we don't get
**                      the whole command first read.
**      25 Jun 92  JFG  Added DECNET option through TCP socket emulation.
**       6 Jan 93  TBL  Plusses turned to spaces between keywords
**       7 Jan 93  JS   Bug fix: addrlen had not been set for accept() call
*/
/* (c) CERN WorldWideWeb project 1990-1992. See Copyright.html for details */

Things Evolved...

HTTP 0.9 written as implemented

Assume TCP; default to port 80
Server accepts connection
Client sends ASCII request: GET document-address\r\n
or a search: GET document-address?search+term\r\n
Server returns LF or CR/LF delimited HTML lines in response
Plain text responses are preceded by a <PLAINTEXT> line
Errors are human readable HTML and aren't differentiated from a non-error response
Server disconnects when the document is transmitted

https://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/AsImplemented.html

CERN provided:

pseudocode of implementation architecture

very basic examples, including shell script examples

and some amazingly worded advice:

If you know the perl language, then that is a powerful (if otherwise incomprehensible) language with which to hack together a server.

Easy to Implement

An Important Rule

If an implementation receives a header that it does not understand, it must ignore the header.

HTTP 1.0

Described in RFC 1945, from May 1996, HTTP 1.0 documented "common usage" instead of being a formal specification. That is, like HTTP 0.9, HTTP 1.0 described core features of extant usage of HTTP.

20 years later, the capabilities and protocol structure described in HTTP 1.0 still form the core of communication content and structure between HTTP clients and servers

http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc1945.txt

Wildly Successful

GET
POST
HEAD
PUT
DELETE
OPTIONS
CONNECT
other extensions allowed

More Diverse Request Methods

Additional Data Headers

Allowed the client to pass additional information to the server via "HTTP Headers". These are composed of lines, terminated with CR/LF, and formatted as:

key: value

Core HTTP 1.0 Request Headers

Authorization
From
If-Modified-Since
Referer
User-Agent
Pragma: no-cache

Expanded Server Responses

Status Line

All responses are initiated with a status line.

Indicates the HTTP protocol version in effect, a numeric code for the type of response, and a phrase providing a reason for the response. Lines are terminated with LF or CR/LF.

For example:

HTTP/1.0 500 Internal Service Error

Status Codes

Let the client know what kind of response this is.

Code Range	Purpose
1xx: Informational	Not used, but reserved for future use
2xx: Success	The action was successfully received, understood, and accepted.
3xx: Redirection	Further action must be taken in order to complete the request
4xx: Client Error	The request contains bad syntax or cannot be fulfilled
5xx: Server Error	The server failed to fulfill an apparently valid request

Specific Status Codes

Code	Description	Code	Description
200	OK	400	Bad Request
201	Created	401	Unauthorized
202	Accepted	403	Forbiden
204	No Content	404	Not Found
301	Moved Permanently	500	Internal Server Error
302	Moved Temporarily	501	Not Implemented
304	Not Modified	502	Bad Gateway
		503	Service Unavailable

Response/Entity Headers

Allow the server to provide additional information about the response itself, or the payload of the response, to the client. These are ASCII text terminated with a LF or CR/LF, in the same format as the request headers.

Response Header	Entity Header
Location	Allow
Server	Content-Encoding
WWW-Authenticate	Content-Length
	Content-Type
	Expires
	Last-Modified

Use What Makes Sense

Practical Minimum Header Sets

200 OK - Barebones Response

Content-Length: 12345
Content-Type: text/html

Server: WEBrick/1.3.1 (Ruby/2.3.0/2015-12-25)
Content-Length: 12345
Content-Type: text/html
Expires: Sun, 08 May 2016 16:07:32 GMT
Last-Modified: Sun, 17 Apr 2016 16:06:50 GMT

302 Moved Temporarily

Location: http://foo.com/blah.html

Entity Body

Preceded by a single CR/LF line
Encoded as appropriate for the Content-Encoding and Content-Type
If Content-Length is provided, client will wait for that many bytes of data, and may disregard any extra data. Otherwise client accepts data until server disconnects.

Putting It All Together

HTTP/0.9

HTTP 0.9 Request

Connect to server

Simple Response
No Status Line

No Headers

Putting It All Together

HTTP/1.0

HTTP 1.0 Request

Connect to server

Status line

Headers

Putting It All Together

HTTP/2.0

HTTP 1.0 Request

Connect to server

Status line

Headers

Doesn't immediately disconnect.....

Connection: Keep-Alive

Putting It All Together

Did You Notice?

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Etag: 372b7ab-be-5713bcf2
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 190
Last-Modified: Sun, 17 Apr 2016 16:42:26 GMT
Server: WEBrick/1.3.1 (Ruby/2.3.0/2015-12-25)
Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2016 17:15:54 GMT
Connection: close

<html>
    <head>
        <title>Example Doc for HTTP 1.0 Request</title>
    </head>

    <body>
        <p>Here lies content.</p>
        <p>It lived a simple life.</p>
    </body>
</html>

HTTP/1.1 ?

What are these?

Etag

Date

Connection

A Server Isn't Strictly Constrained by Request Protocol

Clients ignore what they don't understand.
HTTP is generally backwards compatible.
HTTP 1.0 amended to HTTP 1.1 after 3 years; this added more now-ubiquitous near-essential headers.
Date - The time from the server point of view
ETag - Hash value of the content; helps caches
Connection - What happens after the response is returned
WEBrick returns HTTP 1.1 responses for any HTTP 1.x requests.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616

HTTP 1.1

The De Facto Modern Standard

RFC 2616, from June 1999

HTTP 1.0 was still lacking in some features that turned out to be very useful. HTTP 1.1 filled those gaps, and 17 years later it's still the backbone of HTTP server capability.

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt

Key Protocol Changes

Send a Date if at all possible
Connection Management
Host Identification
Message Transmission
Bandwidth Optimization
Caching
Security
Content Negotiation
Future Proofing
Errors

Connection: Keep-Alive

A single page may require many assets to assemble it.
Setup/teardown of many TCP requests is expensive.
Expensive == slow

"Connection: Keep-Alive" permits pipelining of requests through a single network connection between client and server.

Not part of RFC 1945; effectively bolted onto HTTP 1.0 because of it's utility, but actually part of HTTP 1.1.

Connection: Keep-Alive

HTTP 1.0 clients must send "Connection: Keep-Alive" if they

support it. Otherwise, an HTTP 1.1+ server will assume no support and send:

Connection: close

"Close" tells the client that the connection will be closed after the complete response has been sent.

Connection: Keep-Alive

"Connection: close" is always safe. A client that has specified Keep-Alive will cope if the server doesn't honor it and returns "Connection: close"

HTTP 2.0 has much expanded Keep-Alive, supporting concurrent requests over a single connection.

HTTP 1.1+ servers should assume Keep-Alive unless client tells it otherwise. However...

Connection and

Single-Hop Headers

HTTP 1.1 allows special handling for headers that apply for only a single hop in a message's path.

For example, proxy servers that might add headers separate from what came from the originating client.

Any headers listed in the Connection header are removed by

the recipient before forwarding the message to the next hop.

Host

Prior to HTTP 1.1, an HTTP server assumed that all request to it were for the same host/site.

i.e. site.a.foo.com and site.b.foo.com both go to a server at 192.168.23.23, an HTTP 1.0 server treats them both the same.

An HTTP 1.1+ server, though, can differentiate requests on 192.168.23.23 for site.a.foo.com and site.b.foo.com, and serve different responses for each.

Virtual Hosting

Message Transmission

Imagine:

GET /media/giant_file.mpeg HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Content-Type: video/mp4
Content-Length: 540387995
Connection: close

That is a lot of data to send in one big chunk, or for the server to potentially process in one big chunk. A Ruby string containing more than 500 megabytes would use a lot of RAM, for example.

Message Transmission

Wouldn't it be nice if a very large response, or one where the length isn't know when transmission starts, could be sent a little bit at a time?

Message Transmission

Chunked encoding to the rescue.

Send content in smaller pieces, by prepending the length of each chunk, in hexadecimal, on on a line preceding the chunk itself.

Transfer-Encoding: chunked

<= Recv data, 105 bytes (0x69)
0000: 10
0004: I am some conten
0016: 10
001a: t that will be p
002c: 10
0030: arted out into a
0042: 10
0046:  bunch of small
0058: 7
005b: chunks.
0064: 0
0067:

Message Transmission

Lines terminated with CRLF
Chunk is a length line, expressed in hexadecimal, followed by a content line.
Chunks are terminated by an empty chunk with a length of zero.
Content-Length must not be sent when using chunked encoding.

Transfer-Encoding: chunked

<= Recv data, 105 bytes (0x69)
0000: 10
0004: I am some conten
0016: 10
001a: t that will be p
002c: 10
0030: arted out into a
0042: 10
0046:  bunch of small
0058: 7
005b: chunks.
0064: 0
0067:

Message Transmission

Beware Content-Length + Transfer-Encoding: chunked

If you are writing a server, chunked encoding is very useful for large content. However, beware code that blindly computes and attaches a Content-Length to all HTTP responses.

It "works", but it recently quit working in some cases - Windows 7 Chrome streaming to an external app like Adobe Reader, for example.

It's invalid HTTP, and so what "works" now may not tomorrow.

Bandwidth Optimization

Bandwidth is a very limited resource.

HTTP 1.0 had limited tools to allow clients and servers to make more efficient use of their bandwidth.

Compression was supported, but poorly.

Partial requests, or incremental requests, were not supported at all.

Bandwidth Optimization

HTTP 1.0 didn't distinguish between content encodings, such as compression, that applied to a message end-to-end versus hop-to-hop.

HTTP 1.0 had poor support for negotiating compression.

HTTP 1.1 specifically and extensively defines the protocol for both negotiation, and disambiguation between encoding inherent in the format of the message (end-to-end encoding) and encoding applied only for a single hop.

Compression

Bandwidth Optimization

Content-Encoding

This describes an encoding which is an inherent quality of the resource. It can be used by a server when returning a message to a client.

Compression

Bandwidth Optimization

Accept-Encoding

HTTP 1.1 carefully defines this header, which is used by a client to tell the server about encodings (such as gzip) that it

can support for Content-Encoding, and it's preferences.

Compression

Accept-Encoding:gzip, deflate, sdch

Bandwidth Optimization

Transfer-Encoding

This is intended to describe the hop-by-hop transport layer encoding of the resource. The intention of the HTTP protocol is that this header will be used when a server compresses content, such as a web page, on the fly, before transmission to a client in order to save bandwidth.

Compression

Bandwidth Optimization

TE

The TE header is akin to Accept-Encoding, but applies to the use of the Transfer-Encoding header. In addition to defining encodings, it can also be used to indicate whether the client is willing to accept trailer fields with chunked encoding. Read the RFC for more information about trailer fields.

Compression

TE:trailers, gzip; q=0.8, deflate; q=0.5

Bandwidth Optimization

Content-Encoding

Compression

Transfer-Encoding

Bandwidth Optimization

Content-Encoding vs Transfer-Encoding

Compression

Bandwidth Optimization

Content-Encoding vs Transfer-Encoding

Compression

Actual implementation in the real world of HTTP sometimes varies.

Imagine

if you

will...

A client is willing to accept on-the-fly compression of web pages and other uncompressed assets.

A server is willing to send them.

Bandwidth Optimization

Content-Encoding vs Transfer-Encoding

Compression

TE:trailers, gzip; q=0.8, deflate; q=0.5

By RFC, client can send:

And server may respond:

Transfer-Encoding: gzip

Bandwidth Optimization

Content-Encoding vs Transfer-Encoding

Compression

In practice, your mileage may vary; most implementations use Accept-Encoding and Content-Encoding to negotiate and deliver on-the-fly compression of resources.

Bandwidth Optimization

Content-Encoding vs Transfer-Encoding

Compression

Accept-Encoding:gzip, deflate, sdch

Client actually sends:

Server then responds with:

Content-Encoding:gzip

Bandwidth Optimization

Content-Encoding vs Transfer-Encoding

Compression

HTTP gets complicated very quickly in the real world, so be careful with features you choose to support and implement.

Another example. The deflate encoding is defined by RFC to be data compressed with the deflate (RFC 1951) algorithm, formatted into a zlib (RFC 1950) stream. Microsoft clients and servers historically treated it as a raw deflate stream, however, which was incompatible with an RFC compliant implementation.

Bandwidth Optimization

TL;DR Summary

Compression

Read the RFC, then check how it's actually implemented.

Bandwidth Optimization

Range Requests

Allows retrieval of only a fragment of a resource.

Continue a failed transfer
Tail a large, growing file (e.x. web version of tail -f /var/log/messages)
Retrieve document previews
Retrieve a very large file over an extended period of time via range requests for smaller, manageable chunks.

Content-Negotiation

The world has many languages, character sets, encodings, and media types. HTTP 1.0 provided a mechanism for clients to express content preferences, but it was ambiguously specified.

HTTP 1.1 is much more explicit and expansive.

Accept-Language: en, es;q=0.5, nl;q=0.1

https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html

Accept: text/html;q=1.0, text/*;q=0.8,
        image/png;q=0.7, image/*;q=0.5,
        */*;q=0.1

Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1, utf-8;q=0.9

Accept-Encoding: gzip, compress;q=0.8, deflate;q=0.1

English, Spanish, or Dutch as a last resort

HTML, or other text formats, PNGs, other image formats, or anything else.

ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8

GZip, compress, or deflate as a last resort.

Caching

Caching is love.

HTTP 1.0 supported caching.

HTTP 1.1 improves it.

ETag
Conditional Headers
Cache-Control
Vary

Caching

Last-Modified

A server should send a Last-Modified header with a response, provided that there is a reasonable and consistent way to determine this.

Ruby makes it simple to generate a properly formatted date:

require 'time'

File.mtime( resource ).httpdate

Tue, 15 Sep 2015 13:21:54 GMT

Caching

ETag

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
ETag: ab788a046ac8c135891669d8531d6fa9
Content-Type: image/jpeg
Content-Length: 114962
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2016 12:25:35 GMT

An ETag is an entity tag. It is an opaque indicator of the uniqueness of a resource.

i.e. it is a hash

A server may construct the ETag in any way. The only requirement is that the ETag be comparable to others from the same server, and that identical tags indicate an identical resource.

Caching

Conditional Headers

As with everything in HTTP, the full specification is pretty involved: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7232

If-Match
If-None-Match
If-Modified-Since
If-Unmodified-Since
If-Range

Caching

Cache-Control

Also complex:

https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.9

May be used in both by both clients and servers, in both requests and responses, to modify caching behavior.

Directives such as max-age can ensure relatively fresh responses, even in the face of clock skew, while the private and no-store directives help to hedge against caches keeping private data, or data that is fresh only for the immediate response. See the RFC for full details.

Caching

Vary

Content negotiation means that a single URL can potentially return multiple different resources.

Vary tells a caching implementation to consider additional URLs when calculating an ETag to use in comparing content for cache validation purposes.

For example:

Vary: Accept-Language

Factor the contents of Accept-Language into the generated ETag.

Security

Authentication

HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
Date: Sat, 30 Apr 2016 23:39:59 GMT
WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="sekrit_stuff"
Expires: Sat, 30 Apr 2016 23:39:59 GMT
Last-Modified: Thu, 28 Apr 2016 19:54:23 GMT
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/html

Client (typically) queries user for username/password, then reissues the request with an Authentication header containing those attributes. Client may cache and continue sending these attributes for any requests for the same realm.

Weakness of this is that the username / password is transmitted in clear text.

HTTP/1.0 defined Basic authentication, a challenge/response mechanism for authenticated access to a resource.

Server responds to a request with a WWW-Authenticate header.

Security

Digest Authentication

Full details at: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2617

Same fundamental sequence as Basic Authentication, but it includes more information, and uses hashing algorithms:

HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
Date: Sat, 30 Apr 2016 23:39:59 GMT
WWW-Authenticate: Digest realm="sekrit_stuff",
                  qop=auth
                  nonce="58647bd2acd7935c4b058702c363e872",
                  opaque="05dd324d8d5129a65a4e0c8d34b9e1f3"
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 0

GET /index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost
Authorization: Digest username="Mufasa",
               realm="testrealm@host.com",
               nonce="f527aab47bb12114c31725da7df9fb7e",
               uri="/index.html",
               qop=auth,
               nc=00000001,
               cnonce="f1c4a297",
               response="6629fae49393a05397450978507c4ef1",
               opaque="05dd324d8d5129a65a4e0c8d34b9e1f3"

Server Response

Client Authenticated Request

Security

Proxy Authentication

Hop-by-hop version of WWW Authenticate and Authorization

headers, intended for proxy usage.

Proxy-Authenticate

Proxy-Authorization

Use 407 Proxy Authentication Required instead of a 401 status line.

Errors

HTTP/1.1 added 24 new status codes, plus a mechanism for returning warnings on an ostensibly successful response.

Notable new status codes:

409 (Conflict), returned when a request would conflict with the current state of the resource. For example, a PUT request might violate a versioning policy.
410 (Gone), used when a resource has been removed permanently from a server, and to aid in the deletion of any links to the resource.

Errors

https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.46

Warnings

Warning headers provide caveats or additional information about an ostensibly successful response.

Can be used to provide additional information on caching operations or transformations. See the RFC if you are implementing complex cache/transformation behaviors.

It's Complex

HTTP is a mix of specification and description of common usage.

HTTP/1.1 https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html

It has evolved substantially over time.

HTTP/2.0 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7540

HTTP downgrades well when features that a client wants are missing, so for any server implementation, start simply, then layer HTTP features, referring to the RFCs frequently. When in doubt, research how other implementations do it.

Web Server Architecture

There is nothing special about web server architecture.

It is just server architecture.

A web server is nothing more than a server that receives HTTP requests and returns HTTP responses, typically through standard socket communications.

require 'socket'

def run
  simple_server = TCPServer.new("0.0.0.0", 8080)

  loop do
    connection = simple_server.accept
    handle connection
  end
end

def get_request connection
  connection.gets
end

def process request
  "OK"
end

def handle connection
 request = get_request connection
 response = process request
 connection.puts response
 connection.close
end

run

Basic TCP Server

OK.... Server Architecture

• Setup

• Command line arguments

• Configuration

• Listen on socket(s)

• Enter main loop

• Accept socket connection

• Handle connection

• Be prepared to handle signals for clean shutdown

Setup

Command Line Arguments

Ruby has an absurd wealth of different libraries and frameworks for handing CLI option parsing and app creation.

OptionParser	http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.3.0/libdoc/optparse/rdoc/OptionParser.html
Highline	https://github.com/JEG2/highline
Methadone	https://github.com/davetron5000/methadone
GetOpt	https://github.com/djberg96/getopt
Belafonte	https://github.com/ess/belafonte
Main	https://github.com/ahoward/main
GLI	https://github.com/davetron5000/gli
Thor	https://github.com/erikhuda/thor
Samovar	https://github.com/ioquatix/samovar

...and about 30 others. Use what you like. Ruby has options!

Setup

Configuration

As with command line options, Ruby offers a diverse set of simple tools for handling configuration files.

Ruby
JSON File
YAML File
Configatron	https://github.com/markbates/configatron
Settingslogic	https://github.com/settingslogic/settingslogic

Class AppConfiguration
  LISTEN_ON = ['0.0.0.0:80','127.0.0.1:5000']
end

require 'json'
AppConfiguration = JSON.parse( File.read( config_file_path ) )

require 'yaml'
AppConfiguration = YAML.load( File.read( config_file_path ) )

require 'app_configuration.rb'

Listen on Sockets

AKA Network Communications

A server needs a way to receive requests and to return responses.

The two most common options:

Native Ruby Networking Support (TCPServer and friends)
EventMachine

Listen on Sockets

Native Ruby Networking Support

Ruby has a rich set of networking libraries, making it easy to write TCP clients and servers.

require 'socket'

class SimpleServer < TCPServer

  def initialize( address, port )
    super( address, port )
  end

  def run( address = '127.0.0.1', port = 80 )
    loop do
      socket = server.accept
      handle_request( socket.gets )
    end
  end

  def handle_request( req )
    # Do Stuff with req
  end

end

Main Loop

i.e. Concurrency Options

How a server handles concurrency is fundamental to it's design.

The prior basic server template was a blocking server.

Handles a single request at a time.

Long running requests cause the OS to queue waiting requests on the socket.

Main Loop

Blocking Server

Short Tangent

Simplest Ruby Web Server....

ruby -run -e httpd -- -p 8080 .

Short Tangent

Simplest Ruby Web Server....

ruby -run -e httpd -- -p 8080 .

OK....That's kind of cheating.

# frozen_string_literal: false
#
# = un.rb
#
# Copyright (c) 2003 WATANABE Hirofumi <eban@ruby-lang.org>
#
# This program is free software.
# You can distribute/modify this program under the same terms of Ruby.
#
# == Utilities to replace common UNIX commands in Makefiles etc
#
# == SYNOPSIS
#
#   ruby -run -e cp -- [OPTION] SOURCE DEST
#   ruby -run -e ln -- [OPTION] TARGET LINK_NAME
#   ruby -run -e mv -- [OPTION] SOURCE DEST
#   ruby -run -e rm -- [OPTION] FILE
#   ruby -run -e mkdir -- [OPTION] DIRS
#   ruby -run -e rmdir -- [OPTION] DIRS
#   ruby -run -e install -- [OPTION] SOURCE DEST
#   ruby -run -e chmod -- [OPTION] OCTAL-MODE FILE
#   ruby -run -e touch -- [OPTION] FILE
#   ruby -run -e wait_writable -- [OPTION] FILE
#   ruby -run -e mkmf -- [OPTION] EXTNAME [OPTION]
#   ruby -run -e httpd -- [OPTION] DocumentRoot
#   ruby -run -e help [COMMAND]

Short Tangent

def httpd
  setup("", "BindAddress=ADDR", "Port=PORT", "MaxClients=NUM", "TempDir=DIR",
        "DoNotReverseLookup", "RequestTimeout=SECOND", "HTTPVersion=VERSION") do
    |argv, options|
    require 'webrick'
    opt = options[:RequestTimeout] and options[:RequestTimeout] = opt.to_i
    [:Port, :MaxClients].each do |name|
      opt = options[name] and (options[name] = Integer(opt)) rescue nil
    end
    options[:Port] ||= 8080     # HTTP Alternate
    options[:DocumentRoot] = argv.shift || '.'
    s = WEBrick::HTTPServer.new(options)
    shut = proc {s.shutdown}
    siglist = %w"TERM QUIT"
    siglist.concat(%w"HUP INT") if STDIN.tty?
    siglist &= Signal.list.keys
    siglist.each do |sig|
      Signal.trap(sig, shut)
    end
    s.start
  end
end

A Real (simple) Server

require 'socket'
require 'mime-types'
require 'time'
trap 'INT' do; exit end # in a real server, you want more more cleanup than this

DOCROOT = Dir.pwd
CANNED_OK = "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n"
CANNED_NOT_FOUND = "HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found\r\n"
CANNED_BAD_REQUEST = "HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request\r\n"

def run( host = '0.0.0.0', port = '8080' )
  server = TCPServer.new( host, port )
  while connection = server.accept
    request = get_request connection
    response = handle request
    connection.write response
    connection.close
  end
end

def get_request connection
  r = ''
  while line = connection.gets
    r << line
    break if r =~ /\r\n\r\n/m # Request headers terminate with \r\n\r\n
  end

  if r =~ /^(\w+) +(?:\w+:\/\/([^ \/]+))?(([^ \?\#]*)\S*) +HTTP\/(\d\.\d)/
    request_method = $1
    unparsed_uri = $3
    uri = $4.empty? ? nil : $4
    http_version = $5
    name = $2 ? $2.intern : nil

    uri = uri.tr( '+', ' ' ).
        gsub( /((?:%[0-9a-fA-F]{2})+)/n ) { [$1.delete( '%' ) ].pack( 'H*' ) } if uri.include?('%')

    [ request_method, http_version, name, unparsed_uri, uri ]
  else
    nil
  end

end

def handle request
  if request
    process request
  else
    CANNED_BAD_REQUEST + final_headers
  end
end

def process request
  path = File.join( DOCROOT, request.last )
  if FileTest.exist?( path ) and FileTest.file?( path ) and File.expand_path( path ).index( DOCROOT ) == 0
    CANNED_OK +
        "Content-Type: #{MIME::Types.type_for( path )}\r\n" +
        "Content-Length: #{File.size( path )}\r\n" +
        "Last-Modified: #{File.mtime( path )}\r\n" +
        final_headers +
        File.read( path )
  else
    CANNED_NOT_FOUND + final_headers
  end
end

def final_headers
  "Date: #{Time.now.httpdate}\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n"
end

run

A little over 70 lines, and it's enough to build on....

A Real (simple) Server

HTTP 1.0 (barely)
Doesn't actually parse HTTP
Simple, and easily improved
Blocking server; no concurrency

Server Software:
Server Hostname:        127.0.0.1
Server Port:            8080

Document Path:          /simple_blocking_server.rb
Document Length:        1844 bytes

Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   2.635 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      20340000 bytes
HTML transferred:       18440000 bytes
Requests per second:    3795.08 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       0.263 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.263 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          7538.27 [Kbytes/sec] received

Pretty fast? 3795/sec...
localhost
small static assets
easy to be fast when you don't do much...

All examples ran with Ruby 2.3.1

A Real (simple) Server

Slow Responses....

Imagine that it takes some time to generate those responses and return them across the internet to the client.

Make each one take at least one second....

--- simple_blocking_server.rb     2016-05-01 11:16:13.750705766 -0400
+++ simple_blocking_server_slow.rb        2016-05-01 16:08:31.422044736 -0400
@@ -56,6 +56,7 @@
   # This server is stupid. For any request method, and http version, it just tries to serve a static file.
   path = File.join( DOCROOT, request.last )
   if FileTest.exist?( path ) and FileTest.file?( path ) and File.expand_path( path ).index( DOCROOT ) == 0
+    sleep 1
     CANNED_OK +
         "Content-Type: #{MIME::Types.type_for( path )}\r\n" +
         "Content-Length: #{File.size( path )}\r\n" +

A Real (simple) Server

Server Software:
Server Hostname:        127.0.0.1
Server Port:            8080

Document Path:          /simple_blocking_server.rb
Document Length:        1844 bytes

Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   20.022 seconds
Complete requests:      20
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      40680 bytes
HTML transferred:       36880 bytes
Requests per second:    1.00 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       1001.093 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       1001.093 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          1.98 [Kbytes/sec] received

Almost 8000 requests/second down to 1 request/second. Ouch.

How To Address This?

Concurrency!

Multiprocessing

Multithreading

Event Based

Main Loop

Multiprocessing

Just run a bunch of blocking servers, and have something else distribute and balance the load to them.

Load Balancer

Blocking Server

CONCURRENCY! WINNING!

Main Loop

Multiprocessing

Just run a bunch of blocking servers, and have something else distribute and balance the load to them.

Pros

Cons

Simple to implement.
Performance can still be quite good.

Managing processes can be complex.
Limited sharing of resources can be expensive.

Main Loop

--- kiss_slow.rb        2016-05-01 16:08:31.422044736 -0400
+++ kiss_multiprocessing.rb     2016-05-01 16:45:13.238012734 -0400
@@ -11,6 +11,8 @@
 def run( host = '0.0.0.0', port = '8080' )
   server = TCPServer.new( host, port )

+  fork_it
+
   while connection = server.accept
     request = get_request connection
     response = handle request
@@ -20,6 +22,18 @@
   end
 end

+def fork_it( process_count = 9 )
+  pid = nil
+  process_count.times do
+    if pid = fork
+      Process.detach( pid )
+    else
+      break
+    end
+  end
+
+end
+
 def get_request connection
   r = ''
   while line = connection.gets

Listen on a port, then fork.

A child processes share opened ports. OS load balances.

YMMV depending on OS.

Multiprocessing Simple Blocking Server

Main Loop

Document Path:          /simple_blocking_server.rb
Document Length:        1844 bytes

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   20.113 seconds
Complete requests:      200
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      406800 bytes
HTML transferred:       368800 bytes
Requests per second:    9.94 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       1005.662 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       100.566 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          19.75 [Kbytes/sec] received

Multiprocessing Simple Blocking Server

Main Loop

Ruby pre 2.0 was very copy-on-write unfriendly.

Multiprocessing consumed large amounts of RAM.

Modern Rubies are more resource friendly when forking.

  VSZ   RSS
------ -----
596208 14888
 53256 12892
120984 12956
188568 12988
256180 12992
323788 13000
391368 13040
458952 13044
526544 13056
594152 13092
       -----
       131948K

Multiprocessing Simple Blocking Server

Main Loop

Multiprocessing Simple Blocking Server

With slow requests, multiprocessing with blocking servers still often feels like this.

Main Loop

Multithreading

A thread is the smallest sequence of instructions that can be managed independently by the scheduler. Multiple threads will share one process's memory.

Pros

Cons

Threading implementations vary a lot across Ruby implementations.
Locking issues on shared resources can be complicated. i.e. Threads are hard and it's easy to screw it up.

Easier to manage/load-balance in a single piece of software.
Threads are lightweight, so resource usage is generally better.
Can be very performant.

Main Loop

Multithreaded Server

Programming with threads can easily be a talk all by itself. A few quick guides and tutorials:

Main Loop

Multithreaded Server

--- server_slow.rb      2016-05-01 16:08:31.422044736 -0400
+++ server_multithreaded.rb     2016-05-01 21:56:47.997815573 -0400
@@ -11,12 +11,14 @@
 def run( host = '0.0.0.0', port = '8080' )
   server = TCPServer.new( host, port )

-  while connection = server.accept
-    request = get_request connection
-    response = handle request
+  while con = server.accept
+    Thread.new( con ) do |connection|
+      request = get_request connection
+      response = handle request

-    connection.write response
-    connection.close
+      connection.write response
+      connection.close
+    end
   end
 end

Simple, naive implementation - a new thread for every request, and assume everything else just works with this.

Main Loop

Multithreaded Server

Concurrent Requests	Requests per Second
10	9.95
20	19.80
50	48.98
100	96.26
200	184.45
1000	628.33

Slow requests scale pretty well with threads. Diminishing returns when thread count gets high, but not bad for such a trivial implementation.

Main Loop

Event Driven Server

"Event Driven" is a vague label, encompassing numerous patterns and feature sets. One of the most common of these patterns is the Reactor pattern.

The Reactor pattern describes a system that handles asynchronous events, but that does so with synchronous event callbacks.

Main Loop

Event Driven Server

Client/Server interactions are often slow, but most of that time is spent waiting on latencies. CPUs are fast. The rest of the world is pretty slow.

Main Loop

Event Driven Server

An event reactor just spins in a loop, waiting for something to happen - such as a network connection, or data to read or two write.

When it does, an event -- a callback -- is triggered to deal with it.

Callbacks block the reactor.

Main Loop

Event Driven Server

Pros

Cons

Slow callbacks block the reactor.
Callback structured programming can be confusing.

Can be very fast and resource friendly.
With an appropriate underlying event notification facility, can scale to thousands of simultaneous connections.

Main Loop

Event Driven Server

Like Threading, this could easily be a talk all by itself. A few resources for further reading:

Main Loop

Event Driven Server

Many ways to do it, including EventMachine, Celluloid.io, or even a simple pure ruby event framework (SimpleReactor).

Events/reactor stuff gets complicated, so see the examples for code for a couple simple variants. I didn't do a simple diff version of the slow server.

However...

Main Loop

Event Driven Server

require 'simplereactor'
require 'tinytypes'
require 'getoptlong'
require 'socket'
require 'time'

class SimpleWebServer

  attr_reader :threaded

  EXE = File.basename __FILE__
  VERSION = "1.0"

  def self.parse_cmdline
    initialize_defaults

    opts = GetoptLong.new(
      [ '--help',      '-h', GetoptLong::NO_ARGUMENT],
      [ '--threaded',  '-t', GetoptLong::NO_ARGUMENT],
      [ '--processes', '-n', GetoptLong::REQUIRED_ARGUMENT],
      [ '--engine',    '-e', GetoptLong::REQUIRED_ARGUMENT],
      [ '--port',      '-p', GetoptLong::REQUIRED_ARGUMENT],
      [ '--docroot',   '-d', GetoptLong::REQUIRED_ARGUMENT]
    )

    opts.each do |opt, arg|
      case opt
      when '--help'
        puts <<-EHELP
#{EXE} [OPTIONS]

#{EXE} is a very simple web server. It only serves static files. It does very
little parsing of the HTTP request, only fetching the small amount of
information necessary to determine what resource is being requested. The server
defaults to serving files from the current director when it was invoked.

-h, --help:
  Show this help.

-d DIR, --docroot DIR:
  Provide a specific directory for the docroot for this server.

-e ENGINE, --engine ENGINE:
  Tell the webserver which IO engine to use. This is passed to SimpleReactor,
  and will be one of 'select' or 'nio'. If not specified, it will attempt to
  use nio, and fall back on select.

-p PORT, --port PORT:
  The port for the web server to listen on. If this flag is not used, the web
  server defaults to port 80.

-b HOSTNAME, --bind HOSTNAME:
  The hostname/IP to bind to. This defaults to 127.0.0.1 if it is not provided.

-n COUNT, --processes COUNT:
  The number of processess to create of this web server. This defaults to a single process.

-t, --threaded:
  Wrap content deliver in a thread to hedge against slow content delivery.
EHELP
        exit
      when '--docroot'
        @docroot = arg
      when '--engine'
        @engine = arg
      when '--port'
        @port = arg.to_i != 0 ? arg.to_i : @port
      when '--bind'
        @host = arg
      when '--processes'
        @processes = arg.to_i != 0 ? arg.to_i : @port
      when '--threaded'
        @threaded = true
      end
    end
  end

  def self.initialize_defaults
    @docroot = '.'
    @engine = 'nio'
    @port = 80
    @host = '127.0.0.1'
    @processes = 1
    @threaded = false
  end

  def self.docroot
    @docroot
  end

  def self.engine
    @engine
  end

  def self.port
    @port
  end

  def self.host
    @host
  end

  def self.processes
    @processes
  end

  def self.threaded
    @threaded
  end

  def self.run
    parse_cmdline

    SimpleReactor.use_engine @engine.to_sym

    webserver = SimpleWebServer.new

    webserver.run
  end

  def initialize
    @children = nil
    @docroot = self.class.docroot
    @threaded = self.class.threaded
  end

  def run
    @server = TCPServer.new self.class.host, self.class.port

    handle_processes

    SimpleReactor.Reactor.run do |reactor|
      @reactor = reactor
      @reactor.attach @server, :read do |monitor|
        connection = monitor.io.accept
        handle_request '',connection, monitor
      end
    end
  end

  def handle_request buffer, connection, monitor = nil
    eof = false
    buffer << connection.read_nonblock(16384)
  rescue EOFError
    eof = true
  rescue IO::WaitReadable
    # This is actually handled in the logic below. We just need to survive it.
  ensure
    request = parse_request buffer, connection
    if !request && monitor
      @reactor.next_tick do
        @reactor.attach connection, :read do |mon|
          handle_request buffer, connection
        end
      end
    elsif eof && !request
      deliver_400 connection
    elsif request
      handle_response_for request, connection
    end

    if eof
      queue_detach connection
    end
  end

  def queue_detach connection
      @reactor.next_tick do
        @reactor.detach(connection)
        connection.close
      end
  end

  def handle_response_for request, connection
    path = File.join( @docroot, request[:uri] )
    if FileTest.exist?( path ) and FileTest.file?( path ) and File.expand_path( path ).index( @docroot ) == 0

      deliver path, connection
    else
      deliver_404 path, connection
    end
  end

  def parse_request buffer, connection
    if buffer =~ /^(\w+) +(?:\w+:\/\/([^ \/]+))?([^ \?\#]*)\S* +HTTP\/(\d\.\d)/
      request_method = $1
      uri = $3
      http_version = $4
      if $2
        name = $2.intern
        uri = C_slash if @uri.empty?
        # Rewrite the request to get rid of the http://foo portion.
        buffer.sub!(/^\w+ +\w+:\/\/[^ \/]+([^ \?]*)/,"#{@request_method} #{@uri}")
        buffer =~ /^(\w+) +(?:\w+:\/\/([^ \/]+))?([^ \?\#]*)\S* +HTTP\/(\d\.\d)/
        request_method = $1
        uri = $3
        http_version = $4
      end
      uri = uri.tr('+', ' ').gsub(/((?:%[0-9a-fA-F]{2})+)/n) {[$1.delete('%')].pack('H*')} if uri.include?('%')
      unless name
        if buffer =~ /^Host: *([^\r\0:]+)/
          name = $1.intern
        end
      end

      { :uri => uri, :request_method => request_method, :http_version => http_version, :name => name }
    end
  end

  def deliver uri, connection
    if FileTest.directory? uri
      deliver_directory connection
    else
      if threaded
        Thread.new { _deliver uri, connection }
      else
        _deliver uri, connection
      end
    end
  rescue Errno::EPIPE
  rescue Exception => e
    deliver_500 connection, e
  end

  def _deliver uri, connection
    data = File.read(uri)
    last_modified = File.mtime(uri).httpdate
    sleep 1
    connection.write "HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\nContent-Length:#{data.length}\r\nContent-Type: #{content_type_for uri}\r\nLast-Modified: #{last_modified}\r\nConnection:close\r\n\r\n#{data}"
    queue_detach connection
  end

  def deliver_directory
    deliver_403 connection
  end

  def deliver_404 uri, connection
    buffer = "The requested resource (#{uri}) could not be found."
    connection.write "HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found\r\nContent-Length:#{buffer.length}\r\nContent-Type:text/plain\r\nConnection:close\r\n\r\n#{buffer}"
  rescue Errno::EPIPE
  ensure
    queue_detach connection
  end

  def deliver_400 connection
    buffer = "The request was malformed and could not be completed."
    connection.write "HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request\r\nContent-Length:#{buffer.length}\r\nContent-Type:text/plain\r\nConnection:close\r\n\r\n#{buffer}"
  rescue Errno::EPIPE
  ensure
    queue_detach connection
  end

  def deliver_403 connection
    buffer = "Forbidden. The requested resource can not be accessed."
    connection.write "HTTP/1.1 403 Bad Request\r\nContent-Length:#{buffer.length}\r\nContent-Type:text/plain\r\nConnection:close\r\n\r\n#{buffer}"
  rescue Errno::EPIPE
  ensure
    queue_detach connection
  end

  def deliver_500 connection, error
    buffer = "There was an internal server error -- #{error}"
puts buffer
    connection.write "HTTP/1.1 500 Bad Request\r\nContent-Length:#{buffer.length}\r\nContent-Type:text/plain\r\nConnection:close\r\n\r\n#{buffer}"
  rescue Errno::EPIPE
  ensure
    queue_detach connection
  end

  def content_type_for path
    MIME::TinyTypes.types.simple_type_for( path ) || 'application/octet-stream'
  end

  def data_for path_info
    path = File.join(@docroot,path_info)
    path if FileTest.exist?(path) and FileTest.file?(path) and File.expand_path(path).index(docroot) == 0
  end

  def handle_processes
    if self.class.processes > 1
      @children = []
      (self.class.processes - 1).times do |thread_count|
        pid = fork()
        if pid
          @children << pid
        else
          break
        end
      end

      Thread.new { Process.waitall } if @children
    end
  end

end

SimpleWebServer.run

Main Loop

Event Driven Server

With slow requests, this is no better than the simple blocking server.

Document Path:          /server.rb
Document Length:        1844 bytes

Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   10.014 seconds
Complete requests:      10
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      19880 bytes
HTML transferred:       18440 bytes
Requests per second:    1.00 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       1001.423 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       1001.423 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          1.94 [Kbytes/sec] received

Main Loop

Event Driven Server

However, where events shine is in dealing with high communications latencies.

They don't block on IO, so an efficient reactor can service large numbers of high latency connections efficiently.

Main Loop

Event Driven Server

So, while performance is obviously good when testing from localhost:

Document Path:          /server.rb
Document Length:        1844 bytes

Concurrency Level:      50
Time taken for tests:   5.866 seconds
Complete requests:      20000
Failed requests:        0
Total transferred:      39760000 bytes
HTML transferred:       36880000 bytes
Requests per second:    3409.40 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       14.665 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.293 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          6619.03 [Kbytes/sec] received

Main Loop

Event Driven Server

Evented IO handling keeps things happy at high concurrencies, even across the country. For example, this is from anEngine Yard AWS Oregon instance talking to a non-AWS VM on the east coast.

Document Path:          /server.rb
Document Length:        1844 bytes

Concurrency Level:      1000
Time taken for tests:   3.394 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      19907832 bytes
HTML transferred:       18465816 bytes
Requests per second:    2946.48 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       339.387 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.339 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          5728.33 [Kbytes/sec] received

Main Loop

Event Driven Server

Concurrent Requests	Requests per Second
10	3888
50	3814
250	3651
1000	3609
2000	3261
10000	2740

And if your event notification framework is up to it, concurrencies can scale nicely.

Fast Responses

Main Loop

Event Driven Server - Hybridization!

Main Loop

Event Driven Server - Hybridization!

Evented IO can also mix well with threading, letting the slow stuff be slow, while not blocking the reactor from spinning and servicing things that are ready to be serviced.

Main Loop

Event Driven Server

Concurrent Requests	Requests per Second
10	8
50	30
250	181
500	340
1000	511
2000	854
10000	713

Slow (1 second delayed) Responses

Main Loop

Event Driven Server

Reactor/Event IO combined with threading is a great combination, if you are willing to deal with the complexity of implementation.

Even pure Ruby + Ruby 2.3 is pretty fast

Main Loop

EventMachine

10 years of Ruby history
C++ core
Quite fast
Code can get complicated and confusing because of the callback based structure.

Main Loop

EventMachine - How Fast?

Document Path:          /smallfile1462361058
Document Length:        1021 bytes

Concurrency Level:      25
Time taken for tests:   6.474 seconds
Complete requests:      100000
Failed requests:        0
Keep-Alive requests:    100000
Total transferred:      120300000 bytes
HTML transferred:       102100000 bytes
Requests per second:    15447.11 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       1.618 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.065 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          18147.34 [Kbytes/sec] received

Parsing HTTP

It all comes back to the HTTP.

HTTP is a text grammar. To know what a client wants, the server has to be able to make sense of this grammar.

Parsing HTTP

Most of the very simple examples so far have cheated with this.

They use regular expressions. Going too far down that path will drive you to madness and sorrow.

Parsing HTTP

You can't parse [X]HTML with regex. Because HTML can't be parsed by regex. Regex is not a tool that can be used to correctly parse HTML. As I have answered in HTML-and-regex questions here so many times before, the use of regex will not allow you to consume HTML. Regular expressions are a tool that is insufficiently sophisticated to understand the constructs employed by HTML. HTML is not a regular language and hence cannot be parsed by regular expressions. Regex queries are not equipped to break down HTML into its meaningful parts. so many times but it is not getting to me. Even enhanced irregular regular expressions as used by Perl are not up to the task of parsing HTML. You will never make me crack. HTML is a language of sufficient complexity that it cannot be parsed by regular expressions. Even Jon Skeet cannot parse HTML using regular expressions. Every time you attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions, the unholy child weeps the blood of virgins, and Russian hackers pwn your webapp. Parsing HTML with regex summons tainted souls into the realm of the living. HTML and regex go together like love, marriage, and ritual infanticide. The <center> cannot hold it is too late. The force of regex and HTML together in the same conceptual space will destroy your mind like so much watery putty. If you parse HTML with regex you are giving in to Them and their blasphemous ways which doom us all to inhuman toil for the One whose Name cannot be expressed in the Basic Multilingual Plane, he comes. HTML-plus-regexp will liquify the nerves of the sentient whilst you observe, your psyche withering in the onslaught of horror. Rege̿̔̉x-based HTML parsers are the cancer that is killing StackOverflow it is too late it is too late we cannot be saved the trangession of a chi͡ld ensures regex will consume all living tissue (except for HTML which it cannot, as previously prophesied) dear lord help us how can anyone survive this scourge using regex to parse HTML has doomed humanity to an eternity of dread torture and security holes using regex as a tool to process HTML establishes a breach between this world and the dread realm of c͒ͪo͛ͫrrupt entities (like SGML entities, but more corrupt) a mere glimpse of the world of regex parsers for HTML will instantly transport a programmer's consciousness into a world of ceaseless screaming, he comes~~, the pestilent sl~~ithy regex-infection will devour your HTML parser, application and existence for all time like Visual Basic only worse he comes he comes do not fight he com̡e̶s, ̕h̵is un̨ho͞ly radiańcé destro҉ying all enli̍̈́̂̈́ghtenment, HTML tags lea͠ki̧n͘g fr̶ǫm ̡yo͟ur eye͢s̸ ̛l̕ik͏e liquid pain, the song of re̸gular expre~~ssion parsing~~ will extinguish the voices of mortal man from the sphere I can see it can you see ̲͚̖͔̙î̩́t̲͎̩̱͔́̋̀ it is beautiful the final snuffing of the lies of Man ALL IS LOŚ͖̩͇̗̪̏̈́T ALL IS LOST the pon̷y he comes he c̶̮om~~es he co~~mes the ichor permeates all MY FACE MY FACE ᵒh god no NO NOO̼OO NΘ stop the an*̶͑̾̾̅ͫ͏̙̤g͇̫͛͆̾ͫ̑͆l͖͉̗̩̳̟̍ͫͥͨe̠̅s ͎a̧͈͖r̽̾̈́͒͑e not rè̑ͧ̌aͨl̘̝̙̃ͤ͂̾̆ ZA̡͊͠͝LGΌ ISͮ̂҉̯͈͕̹̘̱ TO͇̹̺ͅƝ̴ȳ̳ TH̘Ë͖́̉ ͠P̯͍̭O̚N̐Y̡ H̸̡̪̯ͨ͊̽̅̾̎Ȩ̬̩̾͛ͪ̈́̀́͘ ̶̧̨̱̹̭̯ͧ̾ͬC̷̙̲̝͖ͭ̏ͥͮ͟Oͮ͏̮̪̝͍M̲̖͊̒ͪͩͬ̚̚͜Ȇ̴̟̟͙̞ͩ͌͝S̨̥̫͎̭ͯ̿̔̀ͅ

With Regular Expressions

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454

Parsing HTTP

With Regular Expressions

For limited, specific pieces of information, you can get away with it. People may hate you, but you can do it. Future sanity is not guaranteed, however.

HTTP is so complicated that this approach is madness for most purposes. Use a real parser.

Parsing HTTP

Most People Don't Like Writing Parsers

Fortunately (unless that is the sort of thing that floats your boat) you don't have to. There are several viable options readily available.

Parsing HTTP

Mongrel's Parser

Zed Shaw wrote Mongrel, a Ruby web and application server, about 10 years ago.

The HTTP parser that it used was built using the Ragel state machine compiler. It is a robust and pretty fast. In some version or other, it is used in many Ruby web server implementations.

Parsing HTTP

https://github.com/mongrel/mongrel/blob/master/lib/mongrel.rb#L113

    def process_client(client)
      begin
        parser = HttpParser.new
        params = HttpParams.new
        request = nil
        data = client.readpartial(Const::CHUNK_SIZE)
        nparsed = 0

        # Assumption: nparsed will always be less since data will get filled with more
        # after each parsing.  If it doesn't get more then there was a problem
        # with the read operation on the client socket.  Effect is to stop processing when the
        # socket can't fill the buffer for further parsing.
        while nparsed < data.length
          nparsed = parser.execute(params, data, nparsed)

          if parser.finished?
            if not params[Const::REQUEST_PATH]
              # it might be a dumbass full host request header
              uri = URI.parse(params[Const::REQUEST_URI])
              params[Const::REQUEST_PATH] = uri.path
            end

            raise "No REQUEST PATH" if not params[Const::REQUEST_PATH]

            script_name, path_info, handlers = @classifier.resolve(params[Const::REQUEST_PATH])

            if handlers
              params[Const::PATH_INFO] = path_info
              params[Const::SCRIPT_NAME] = script_name

              # From http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3875 :
              # "Script authors should be aware that the REMOTE_ADDR and REMOTE_HOST
              #  meta-variables (see sections 4.1.8 and 4.1.9) may not identify the
              #  ultimate source of the request.  They identify the client for the
              #  immediate request to the server; that client may be a proxy, gateway,
              #  or other intermediary acting on behalf of the actual source client."
              params[Const::REMOTE_ADDR] = client.peeraddr.last

              # select handlers that want more detailed request notification
              notifiers = handlers.select { |h| h.request_notify }
              request = HttpRequest.new(params, client, notifiers)

              # in the case of large file uploads the user could close the socket, so skip those requests
              break if request.body == nil  # nil signals from HttpRequest::initialize that the request was aborted

              # request is good so far, continue processing the response
              response = HttpResponse.new(client)

              # Process each handler in registered order until we run out or one finalizes the response.
              handlers.each do |handler|
                handler.process(request, response)
                break if response.done or client.closed?
              end

              # And finally, if nobody closed the response off, we finalize it.
              unless response.done or client.closed? 
                response.finished
              end
            else
              # Didn't find it, return a stock 404 response.
              client.write(Const::ERROR_404_RESPONSE)
            end

            break #done
          else
            # Parser is not done, queue up more data to read and continue parsing
            chunk = client.readpartial(Const::CHUNK_SIZE)
            break if !chunk or chunk.length == 0  # read failed, stop processing

            data << chunk
            if data.length >= Const::MAX_HEADER
              raise HttpParserError.new("HEADER is longer than allowed, aborting client early.")
            end
          end
        end
      rescue EOFError,Errno::ECONNRESET,Errno::EPIPE,Errno::EINVAL,Errno::EBADF
        client.close rescue nil
      rescue HttpParserError => e
        Mongrel.log(:error, "#{Time.now.httpdate}: HTTP parse error, malformed request (#{params[Const::HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR] || client.peeraddr.last}): #{e.inspect}")
        Mongrel.log(:error, "#{Time.now.httpdate}: REQUEST DATA: #{data.inspect}\n---\nPARAMS: #{params.inspect}\n---\n")
        # http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec10.4
        client.write(Const::ERROR_400_RESPONSE)
      rescue Errno::EMFILE
        reap_dead_workers('too many files')
      rescue Object => e
        Mongrel.log(:error, "#{Time.now.httpdate}: Read error: #{e.inspect}")
        Mongrel.log(:error, e.backtrace.join("\n"))
      ensure
        begin
          client.close
        rescue IOError
          # Already closed
        rescue Object => e
          Mongrel.log(:error, "#{Time.now.httpdate}: Client error: #{e.inspect}")
          Mongrel.log(:error, e.backtrace.join("\n"))
        end
        request.body.delete if request and request.body.class == Tempfile
      end
    end

Parsing HTTP

WEBrick::HTTPRequest

WEBrick has a serviceable, if not gloriously fast, parser.

Just pass it an IO object, and it'll returned a structure built from the parsed HTTP.

request = WEBrick::HTTPRequest.new( WEBrick::Config::HTTP )
request.parse( request_io )

Parsing HTTP

EVMA_HTTPServer's Parser

The HTTP parser that is part of the EVMA_HTTPServer web server implementation that is in the EventMachine project. It could use some love, but it works.

require 'mime-types'
require 'eventmachine'
require 'evma_httpserver'

trap 'INT' do; exit end # in a real server, you want more more cleanup than this

class MyHttpServer < EM::Connection
  include EM::HttpServer

  DOCROOT = Dir.pwd

  def post_init
    super
    no_environment_strings
  end

  def process_http_request
    response = EM::DelegatedHttpResponse.new(self)
    path = File.join( DOCROOT, @http_request_uri )
    if FileTest.exist?( path ) and FileTest.file?( path ) and File.expand_path( path ).index( DOCROOT ) == 0
      response.status = 200
      response.content_type MIME::Types.type_for( path ).last.to_s
      response.content = File.read( path )
      response.send_response
    else
      response.status = 200
      response.content = "The resource #{path} could not be found."
      response.send_response
    end
  end

  def final_headers
    "Date: #{Time.now.httpdate}\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n"
  end

end

EM.run {
  EM.start_server '0.0.0.0', 80, MyHttpServer
}

Parsing HTTP

Joyent's HTTP Parser

There is a Ruby library, http_parser.rb, that is built on top of the Joyent (NodeJS) parser. This is also a fast, battle proven parser like the Mongrel parser, and is widely used.

Signals and Miscellany

The Other Details To Be a Well Behaved Daemon

Handle signals so that you die gracefully
Cleanup after yourself

Web Server

vs

Application Server

• A web server speaks HTTP with clients, answering requests for resources.

• An applications server contains an application, and answers requests for application resources.

• Generally, application servers are a specific type of web server.

Rack

Rack provides an interface between a web server and a Ruby application.

Rack has a simple interface.

An object that responds to the call method, and takes a hash of environment variables.

The call method returns an array containing the HTTP response code, a hash of HTTP headers, and the response body, which is contained in an object that responds to each.

Rack

http://rack.github.io/

Canonical example

# my_rack_app.rb
 
require 'rack'
 
app = Proc.new do |env|
    ['200', {'Content-Type' => 'text/html'}, ['A barebones rack app.']]
end
 
Rack::Handler::WEBrick.run app

Rack

Rails and most other Ruby web frameworks utilize Rack. That is, a Rails application is Rack application.

Rack

Rack Handlers

A Rack handler is the glue between the rack application and the web server that is responsible for handling it.

Rack itself ships with handlers for CGI, FCGI, SCGI, the LiteSpeed Web Server (LSWS), Thin, and Webrick.

You can write your own.

https://github.com/rack/rack/blob/master/lib/rack/handler/cgi.rb for an example.

Ruby Web Servers

A Quick Survey

WEBrick
Mongrel
Thin
Puma
Passenger
Unicorn
Rainbows!
Yahns
Goliath
Swiftiply

WEBrick

• Pure Ruby

• Thread based design

• Written in 2000 by Masayoshi Takahashi and Yuuzou Gotou.

• Ubiquitous, as it is bundled with Ruby itself.

• Flexible, fairly featureful, and easy to use.

• Fairly well documented.

• Fairly slow.

Mongrel

• Zed Shaw, 2006

• Ruby plus a C extension for parsing HTTP, built with Ragel

• Moderately fast for it's age

• EOL at 1.1.5 in a version that doesn't work with modern Rubies

• There is a 1.2.x version (gem install --pre mongrel) that does work with modern Rubies

• Completely unmaintained, but it is interesting code to look at and learn from.

Swiftiply

• My baby. May 2007

• Built on top of EventMachine

• Original used regex for HTTP parsing....

• Structurally has support for real parsing, but needs work

• Intended to be a load balancing reverse proxy with a twist, with light web serving capabilities (static files, mostly)

• Very fast

*• AFAIK, at least 100 production sites still use it

Thin

• Marc-André Cournoyer, 2008

• Mongrel HTTP Parser

• Rack interface

• EventMachine

• Pretty fast. Still pretty commonly used

Goliath

• PostRank Labs, 2011

• Built on top of EventMachine

• Completely asynchronous design, leveraging Ruby fibers to unwind callback complexity

• Performance and resource focused

• Niche usage

Puma

• Evan Phoenix, 2011

• Built on the bones of Mongrel

• Built from the ground up with concurrency in mind

• Rack

• Runs on all major Ruby implementations (MRI, JRuby, Rubinius)

• If you use Thin, take a look at Puma

Passenger

• Phusion Passenger

• Heavy Rails world usage

• Directly integrates to Apache or Nginx

• New version includes a fast purpose built web server, Raptor

• Rack

• Commercial version has more multithreading/concurrency options than the single open source version does

Unicorn

• Built on Mongrel's bones by Eric Wong circa 2009

• fork() (i.e. built in multiprocessing) oriented

• Not the fastest, but it deals well with slow/variable requests

• Very mature, and very heavy utilization in the Rails world

• With modern copy-on-write friendly Rubies, can have nice resource utilization

Rainbows!

• Unicorn specifically tuned for those very big, very slow requests

Yahns

• Another in the Unicorn family

• Tuned for apps that receive very little traffic

• When idle, it is truly idle

• Very sensitive to app failures

Thank You!

Let's build some stuff. Ask me questions. Tell me what you want.

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Let's Build a Webserver!

By wyhaines

Let's Build a Webserver!

Railsconf 2016 Workshop -- Building web servers with Ruby

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