Sandbird

A tiny (~800sloc) embeddable HTTP server written in C89, compatible with Linux, OSX and Windows.

Getting started

Sandbird consists of two files: sandbird.c and sandbird.h. Both of these files should be dropped into an existing project and compiled along with it. Sandbird works asynchronously and does not use threads, an event handler is invoked when an event -- such as a request -- occurs.

static int event_handler(sb_Event *e) {
  if (e->type == SB_EV_REQUEST) {
    sb_send_status(e->stream, 200, "OK");
    sb_send_header(e->stream, "Content-Type", "text/plain");
    sb_writef(e->stream, "Hello world");
  }
  return SB_RES_OK;
}

The server is initialised by setting up a sb_Options struct and passing a pointer to it to sb_new_server(). At a minimum the port and handler fields of the sb_Options struct should be set.

sb_Server *srv;
sb_Options opt;

memset(&opt, 0, sizeof(opt));
opt.port = "8000";
opt.handler = event_handler;

srv = sb_new_server(&opt);

If sb_new_server() encounters an error, NULL is returned -- in this case it is most likely the socket could not be bound. A non-NULL return value means the server started successfully and is listening for connections.

The poll function must be called on the server object regularly so that it can handle new and existing connections. The poll function accepts a timeout value in milliseconds -- if this is set to 0 then the function will not block.

for (;;) {
  sb_poll_server(srv, 1000);
}

When we are done with the server the sb_close_server() function can be called on it. This will close the server's listening socket and free any resources which were being used.

sb_close_server(srv);

Some simple example programs can be found in the example/ directory.

License

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the MIT license. See LICENSE for details.