HTTP::Server::Simple

 use warnings;
 use strict;

 use HTTP::Server::Simple;

 my $server = HTTP::Server::Simple->new();
 $server->run();

However, normally you will sub-class the HTTP::Server::Simple::CGI module (see HTTP::Server::Simple::CGI);

 package Your::Web::Server;
 use base qw(HTTP::Server::Simple::CGI);

 sub handle_request {
     my ($self, $cgi) = @_;

     #... do something, print output to default
     # selected filehandle...

 }

 1;

This is a simple standalone HTTP server. By default, it doesn't thread or fork.

It does, however, act as a simple frontend which can be used to build a standalone web-based application or turn a CGI into one.

(It's possible to use Net::Server to get threading, forking, preforking and so on. Autrijus Tang wrote the functionality and owes docs for that ;)

By default, the server traps a few signals:

HUP

When you CWkill -HUP the server, it does its best to rexec itself. Please note that in order to provide restart-on-SIGHUP, HTTP::Server::Simple sets a SIGHUP handler during initialisation. If your request handling code forks you need to make sure you reset this or unexpected things will happen if somebody sends a HUP to all running processes spawned by your app (e.g. by kill -HUP <script>)

PIPE

If the server detects a broken pipe while writing output to the client, it ignores the signal. Otherwise, a client closing the connection early could kill the server

API call to start a new server. Does not actually start listening until you call CW->run().

Looks up the local host's hostname and IP address.

Stuffs them into

$self->{'localname'} and CW$self->{'localaddr'}

Takes an optional port number for this server to listen on.

Returns this server's port. (Defaults to 8080)

Takes an optional host address for this server to bind to.

Returns this server's bound address (if any). Defaults to CWundef (bind to all interfaces).

Run the server in the background. returns pid.

Run the server. If all goes well, this won't ever return, but it will start listening for http requests.

User-overridable method. If you set it to a CWNet::Server subclass, that subclass is used for the CWrun method. Otherwise, a minimal implementation is used as default.

When called with an argument, sets the socket to the server to that arg.

Returns the socket to the server; you should only use this for actual socket-related calls like CWgetsockname. If all you want is to read or write to the socket, you should use CWstdin_handle and CWstdout_handle to get the in and out filehandles explicitly.

Returns a filehandle used for input from the client. By default, returns whatever was set with CWstdio_handle, but a subclass could do something interesting here (see HTTP::Server::Simple::Logger).

Returns a filehandle used for output to the client. By default, returns whatever was set with CWstdio_handle, but a subclass could do something interesting here (see HTTP::Server::Simple::Logger).

A selection of these methods should be provided by sub-classes of this module.

This method is called after setup, with no parameters. It should print a valid, full HTTP response to the default selected filehandle. This method is called with a name => value list of various things to do with the request. This list is given below.

The default setup handler simply tries to call methods with the names of keys of this list.

  ITEM/METHOD   Set to                Example
  -----------  ------------------    ------------------------
  method       Request Method        "GET", "POST", "HEAD"
  protocol     HTTP version          "HTTP/1.1"
  request_uri  Complete Request URI  "/foobar/baz?foo=bar"
  path         Path part of URI      "/foobar/baz"
  query_string Query String          undef, "foo=bar"
  port         Received Port         80, 8080
  peername     Remote name           "200.2.4.5", "foo.com"
  peeraddr     Remote address        "200.2.4.5", "::1"
  localname    Local interface       "localhost", "myhost.com"

You have lots of options when it comes to how you receive headers.

You can, if you really want, define CWparse_headers() and parse them raw yourself.

Secondly, you can intercept them very slightly cooked via the CWsetup() method, above.

Thirdly, you can leave the CWsetup() header as-is (or calling the superclass CWsetup() for unknown request items). Then you can define CWheaders() in your sub-class and receive them all at once.

Finally, you can define handlers to receive individual HTTP headers. This can be useful for very simple SOAP servers (to name a crack-fueled standard that defines its own special HTTP headers).

To do so, you'll want to define the CWheader() method in your subclass. That method will be handed a (key,value) pair of the header name and the value.

If defined by a sub-class, this method is called directly after an accept happens.

If defined by a sub-class, this method is called after all setup has finished, before the handler method.

This routine prints a banner before the server request-handling loop starts.

Methods below this point are probably not terribly useful to define yourself in subclasses.

Parse the HTTP request line.

Returns three values, the request method, request URI and the protocol Sub-classed versions of this should return three values - request method, request URI and proto

Parse incoming HTTP headers from STDIN.

Remember, this is a simple HTTP server, so nothing intelligent is done with them CW:-).

This should return an ARRAY ref of CW(header => value) pairs inside the array.

This routine binds the server to a port and interface.

This method should print a valid HTTP response that says that the request was invalid.

Copyright (c) 2004-2005 Jesse Vincent, <jesse@bestpractical.com>. All rights reserved.

Marcus Ramberg <drave@thefeed.no> contributed tests, cleanup, etc

Sam Vilain, <samv@cpan.org> contributed the CGI.pm split-out and header/setup API.

There certainly are some. Please report them via rt.cpan.org

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.