WebServ — HTTP/1.1 server from scratch in C++98

The problem

Build a production-grade HTTP/1.1 server from scratch — no third-party libraries, no Node.js, no Python. The goal: understand HTTP, sockets, CGI, and concurrent I/O at the system level.

What I built

An HTTP/1.1-compliant server written in C++98 that:

• Parses raw HTTP requests by hand (request line, headers, body, chunked transfer)
• Handles 50+ concurrent connections via non-blocking sockets and a single-threaded event loop
• Uses poll() (or epoll / kqueue depending on platform) for I/O multiplexing
• Supports CGI for executing scripts (PHP, Python) per RFC 3875
• Reads NGINX-style configuration files (server blocks, location blocks, error pages, autoindex)
• Implements GET, POST, DELETE methods with file uploads

Architecture decisions

✏️ TODO:

• State machine design for incremental request parsing
• How CGI processes are spawned and their I/O bridged via pipes
• Configuration parser strategy (recursive descent? tokenizer?)
• Memory model — RAII without smart pointers (C++98 constraint)

What I'd do differently

✏️ TODO

Tech stack

C++98 · POSIX sockets · poll / epoll · CGI (RFC 3875) · HTTP/1.1 (RFC 7230)