Introducing the Qt Http Server

First things first, Happy new year dear Qt users!

I’m sorry, I’m really late Image may be NSFW.
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Some time ago we decided to avoid repeating the same tedious code to write our own “Simple” Http Servers. So we started writing a Qt HTTP server with several essential features. The word simple is quoted because something planned to be “simple” evolved into a piece of code hard to maintain.
To give few numbers during the last two years, I wrote three times the same code to parse request headers, write response headers, deal with connections, … And I know, I’m not the only one who did the same (just check GitHub).

To take a look into the code, you can clone it with:

git clone --recursive https://codereview.qt-project.org/qt-labs/qthttpserver

You can manually build it using the last Qt release.
Before listing the features let’s show the mandatory hello world example:

#include <QtCore>
#include <QtHttpServer>

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
  QCoreApplication app(argc, argv);
  QHttpServer httpServer;
  httpServer.route("/", []() {
    return "Hello world";
  });
  httpServer.listen(QHostAddress::Any);
  return app.exec();
}

At this moment it’s a qt-labs project, and it’s not officially part of the Qt distribution, but at some point, we’ll add it.

Some features already implemented are:

• HTTP 1.1
• HTTPS but not yet merged
• Customizable Routing
• WebSockets integration
• Error handling

I have planned some use-cases for this module:

• Change the current embedded web server (and WebSockets) in the WebGL plugin to make it easy to create your own custom solutions based on the plugin.
• Provide a way to serve an application built with WebAssamebly with live communication with the server via WebSockets and maybe using QtWebChannel.
• Embed a web server into your application running on your desktop machine or embedded device.
• Create a REST API
• HTTP Server for QML
• …

If you’re interested in this project, don’t forget to clone it and maybe if you’re concerned you can consider contributing or provide some feedback in QTBUG-60105.

Next week Mikhail Svetkin will write more about the routing API. Stay tuned Image may be NSFW.
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