mirror of https://github.com/nealey/eris.git
106 lines
3.5 KiB
Plaintext
106 lines
3.5 KiB
Plaintext
About
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=====
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Eris is an HTTP/1.1 web server with CGI.
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It is very fast,
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uses very little memory,
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and has a tiny codebase which has been audited at least twice by gray-hat hackers.
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It relies on an external program,
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such as tcpserver or netcat,
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to handle networking,
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and expects to be run once for every connection.
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This may sound horrible,
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but it's actually pretty quick,
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especially since this architecture makes it trivial to use the
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`sendfile` call in Linux
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(added in 2003 as a reaction to Apache losing to IIS in benchmarks),
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which sends an open file directly to a socket,
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without having to context switch into userspace.
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It conforms to the parts of HTTP/1.1 that appear to be important to clients.
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I have not found any HTTP/1.1 clients which have trouble with Eris,
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including curl, which breaks with fnord (the reason I began work on Eris).
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Eris HTTPD is a part of [Dirtbags Capture The Flag](http://dirtbags.net/ctf/).
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After many patches against [fnord 1.10](http://www.fefe.de/),
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I decided to fork fnord into a new project.
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Fnord's author approved of the fork.
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Differences with fnord
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======================
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Significant differences between eris and fnord are:
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* command-line arguments instead of compile-time defines
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* eliminated use of libowfat
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* no build dependency of dietlibc
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* elimination of "old style symlink handling"
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* elimination of user switching (you can use tcpserver -[ug])
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* elimination of chroot code (you can use chroot)
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* several bugfixes (sent to the fnord mail list)
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* ignores Accept header (fnord also ignores it, but claims not to)
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Usage
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=====
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Start with:
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tcpserver -v -RHl localhost -u 1234 -g 1234 0 80 ./eris
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There are many other ways to start eris.
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For example, you can run an HTTPS server with stunnel.
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You just need something that launches eris with stdin and stdout connected to the client.
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Logging
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-------
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Will log to stderr in the form
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127.0.0.1 200 23 localhost Links_(0.96;_Unix) none /index.html
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where 127.0.0.1 is the client IP, 200 is the HTTP exit code,
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23 is the size of the content that was served (or 0 for unsuccessful exit codes),
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localhost is the Host: header (the virtual host),
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the next token is the user agent with spaces replaced by underscores,
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the next token (none) is the Referer HTTP header or "none" if none was given,
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and the rest of each line is the decoded requested URL.
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Features
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--------
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eris does simple virtual hosting. If the `Host:` HTTP header is there,
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eris will try to chdir to a directory of that name, i.e. if the client
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asks for "/" on host "www.fefe.de", eris will look for
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"www.fefe.de/index.html". Eris will also try the directory "default"
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if no specific directory for the virtual host was there.
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eris implements el-cheapo HTTP ranges (only byte ranges and only of the
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form x-y, not multiple ranges).
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eris will change dots at the start of file or directory names to colons
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in the query before trying to answer them.
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eris understands and implements keep-alive connections.
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eris will use sendfile on Linux to enable zero-copy TCP.
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If eris is given the -c option, it will regard files
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whose names end with ".cgi" as CGI programs and try to execute them.
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Please see <http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/interface.html> for the CGI specification.
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About The Name
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==============
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[Eris](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eris_%28dwarf_planet%29)
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is the most massive (heaviest) dwarf planet in the solar system.
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It's heavier than Pluto!
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Its discovery is what spurred astronomers to finally define the word "planet",
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which resulted in Pluto being classified a dwarf planet.
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Otherwise, we would have to count Eris as a tenth planet.
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