HTTP from TCP in javascript

A low-level implementation of HTTP server from scratch in node js using net for TCP sockets.

It is a functional HTTP/1.1 server including: HTTP request parser, response formatter, some standard headers / response codes etc. Though it might lack some niche standard stuff, but it works :)

Basic working

Base class is HTTPServer. Response can be created using HTTPResponse class.

You can decide what to do with the incoming requests in the handler function. It should return instance of HTTPRespone, which is then written to the connected socket.

const server = new HTTPServer();

function handle(socket, request) {
  // handle request / define routes / create proxy / etc.
}

server.serve(handler);

server.listen(3000, () => {
  console.log("Server listening at port ", 3000);
});

Check this file for a more detailed implementation.

To use the server package outside of the http directory, make sure to run pnpm build

Chunked Streaming

A cute little implementation of a chunked streaming proxy for large responses can also be found in this file.

Pretty much: setting the Transfer-encoding header to chunked and using the writeChunkedBody() method of response class enables sending chunked data.

You can hit the /httpbin/[n] endpoint to stream n amount of chunks from httpbin.org

might add later

• load balancing stuff
• trailers (hashing, content-length, etc.) in chunked encoding
• handling binary data (images, vids, etc.)