How can I implement a simple web server using Python without using any libraries?
http, python, sockets, webserver, websocket
Solution
You can use socket programming for this purpose. The following snippet creates a tcp socket and listens on port 9000 for http requests:
from socket import *
def createServer():
serversocket = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM)
serversocket.bind(('localhost',9000))
serversocket.listen(5)
while(1):
(clientsocket, address) = serversocket.accept()
clientsocket.send("HTTP/1.1 200 OK\n"
+"Content-Type: text/html\n"
+"\n" # Important!
+"<html><body>Hello World</body></html>\n")
clientsocket.shutdown(SHUT_WR)
clientsocket.close()
serversocket.close()
createServer()
Start the server, `$ python server.py`. Open `http://localhost:9000/` in your web-browser (which acts as client). Then in the browser window, you can see the text "Hello World" (http response).
EDIT** The previous code was only tested on chrome, and as you guys suggested about other browsers, the code was modified as:
- To make the response http-alike you can send in plain header with http version 1.1, status code 200 OK and content-type text/html.
- The client socket needs to be closed once response is submitted as it's a TCP socket.
- To properly close the client socket, `shutdown()` needs to be called socket.shutdown vs socket.close
Then the code was tested on chrome, firefox (http://localhost:9000/) and simple curl in terminal (curl http://localhost:9000).
Problem
I need to implement a very simple web-server-like app in Python which would perform basic HTTP requests and responses and display very basic output on the web page. I am not too concerned about actually coding it in Python, but I am not sure where to start? How to set this up? One file? Multiple files? I guess I have no idea how to approach the fact that this is a "server" - so I am unfamiliar with how to approach dealing with HTTP requests/sockets/processing requests, etc. Any advice? Resources?