shost

An HTTP server written in Inko, for self-hosting static websites such as my personal website or the Inko manual.

Why?

There are plenty of capable HTTP servers such as nginx, Caddy and more. I wrote shost for a few reasons:

• As a showcase for Inko
• To further test Inko's capabilities
• To have full control over how the server works
• Because I can

Features

• Serves static files from a set of directories, complete with caching related headers
• Dynamic gzip compression if requested by the client
• Reasonably fast (with a lot of room for improvement): expect somewhere between 50 000 and 100 000 requests/second depending on the underlying hardware
• Some simple heuristics for blocking bots that pretend to be browsers or try to scan for exploits
• No garbage collector ruining the fun by introducing non-deterministic behavior

Anti-features

• Proxying requests to backend servers
• Complex rules for blocking clients based on user-agent values, IP addresses, etc
• Basically whatever isn't currently present or something I have no need for myself

Requirements

• Inko main

Building

To build from source:

inko build --release

The resulting executable is now located in ./build/release/shost.

There's also a container you can use:

podman run \
    --rm \
    --volume path/to/sites:/var/lib/shost \
    --publish 8888:80 \
    ghcr.io/yorickpeterse/shost:latest

This serves the websites in path/to/sites on port 8888 on the host.

If you're using a system with SELinux you'll likely need to add the :z or :Z option to the --volume value, depending on how many containers need access to the sites directory.

Getting started

To serve one or more websites, place them in a directory named after the host in the sites directory (/var/lib/shost by default). For example:

/var/lib/shost/
  foo.com/
    index.html
  bar.org/
    index.html

If a page requested isn't found a default empty 404 response is produced. If the file 404.html exists in the root of a website it's served instead, for example:

/var/lib/shost/
  foo.com/
    index.html
    404.html
  bar.org/
    index.html

If the --tls option is specified, shost will use TLS. In this case it expects a certificate and private key pair for each website in a similar structure. The certificate must be called cert.pem and the private key key.pem. For example, when using shost --tls /etc/ssl/shost the following structure is expected:

/etc/ssl/shost/
  foo.com/
    cert.pem
    key.pem
  bar.org/
    cert.pem
    key.pem

If a certificate and private key pair is missing, connections to the website will be dropped. It's not possible to serve websites using both HTTP and HTTPS at the same time.

Sending SIGHUP to the shost process causes it to reload the list of websites served and the TLS configuration. Sending signals is only necessary when adding or removing websites, not when changing their contents.

License

All source code in this repository is licensed under the Mozilla Public License version 2.0, unless stated otherwise. A copy of this license can be found in the file "LICENSE".