commit	dfd37078ae77a626f4fde2818de6a607f2aefaec	[log] [tgz]
author	Pierre-Olivier Latour <pol@mac.com>	Thu Apr 10 21:27:20 2014
committer	Pierre-Olivier Latour <pol@mac.com>	Thu Apr 10 21:27:20 2014
tree	e0f25a621c2de7336153f3b47d8a4925ff429d39
parent	582c6da74fcf7964eaab82dbfdebb086c9e1c370 [diff]

tree: e0f25a621c2de7336153f3b47d8a4925ff429d39

README.md

Overview

GCDWebServer is a lightweight GCD based HTTP 1.1 server designed to be embedded in Mac & iOS apps. It was written from scratch with the following goals in mind:

Easy to use and understand architecture with only 4 core classes: server, connection, request and response
Well designed API for easy integration and customization
Entirely built with an event-driven design using Grand Central Dispatch for maximal performance and concurrency
No dependencies on third-party source code
Available under a friendly New BSD License

Extra built-in features:

Minimize memory usage with disk streaming of large HTTP request or response bodies
Parser for web forms submitted using “application/x-www-form-urlencoded” or “multipart/form-data” encodings (including file uploads)
JSON parsing and serialization for request and response HTTP bodies
Chunked transfer encoding for request and response HTTP bodies
HTTP compression with gzip for request and response HTTP bodies

Included extensions:

GCDWebUploader: subclass of GCDWebServer that implements an interface for uploading and downloading files from an iOS app's sandbox using a web browser
GCDWebDAVServer: subclass of GCDWebServer that implements a class 1 WebDAV server (with partial class 2 support for OS X Finder)

What's not available out of the box but can be implemented on top of the API:

Authentication like Basic Authentication
Web forms submitted using “multipart/mixed”

What's not supported (but not really required from an embedded HTTP server):

Keep-alive connections
HTTPS

Requirements:

OS X 10.7 or later (x86_64)
iOS 5.0 or later (armv7, armv7s or arm64)

Getting Started

Download or checkout the source for GCDWebServer then add the entire “GCDWebServer” subfolder to your Xcode project. If you intend to use one of the extensions like GCDWebDAVServer or GCDWebUploader, add these subfolders as well.

Alternatively, you can install GCDWebServer using CocoaPods by simply adding this line to your Xcode project's Podfile:

pod "GCDWebServer", "~> 2.0"

Hello World

This code snippet shows how to implement a custom HTTP server that runs on port 8080 and returns a “Hello World” HTML page to any request — since GCDWebServer uses GCD blocks to handle requests, no subclassing or delegates are needed:

#import "GCDWebServer.h"

int main(int argc, const char* argv[]) {
  @autoreleasepool {
    
    // Create server
    GCDWebServer* webServer = [[GCDWebServer alloc] init];
    
    // Add a handler to respond to requests on any URL
    [webServer addDefaultHandlerForMethod:@"GET"
                             requestClass:[GCDWebServerRequest class]
                             processBlock:^GCDWebServerResponse *(GCDWebServerRequest* request) {
      
      return [GCDWebServerDataResponse responseWithHTML:@"<html><body><p>Hello World</p></body></html>"];
      
    }];
    
    // Use convenience method that runs server on port 8080 until SIGINT received
    [webServer runWithPort:8080];
    
    // Destroy server
    [webServer release];
    
  }
  return 0;
}

Web Based Uploads in iOS Apps

GCDWebUploader is a subclass of GCDWebServer that provides a ready-to-use HTML 5 file uploader & downloader. This lets users upload, download, delete files and create directories from a directory inside your iOS app's sandbox using a clean user interface in their web browser.

Simply instantiate and run a GCDWebUploader instance then visit http://{YOUR-IOS-DEVICE-IP-ADDRESS}/ from your web browser:

#import "GCDWebUploader.h"

- (BOOL)application:(UIApplication*)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:(NSDictionary*)launchOptions {
  NSString* documentsPath = [NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES) firstObject];
  GCDWebUploader* webUploader = [[GCDWebUploader alloc] initWithUploadDirectory:documentsPath];
  [webUploader start];
  NSLog(@"Visit %@ in your web browser", webUploader.serverURL);
  return YES;
}

WebDAV Server in iOS Apps

GCDWebDAVServer is a subclass of GCDWebServer that provides a class 1 compliant WebDAV server. This lets users upload, download, delete files and create directories from a directory inside your iOS app's sandbox using any WebDAV client like Transmit (Mac), ForkLift (Mac) or CyberDuck (Mac / Windows).

GCDWebDAVServer should also work with the OS X Finder as it is partially class 2 compliant (but only when the client is the OS X WebDAV implementation).

Simply instantiate and run a GCDWebDAVServer instance then connect to http://{YOUR-IOS-DEVICE-IP-ADDRESS}/ using a WebDAV client:

#import "GCDWebDAVServer.h"

- (BOOL)application:(UIApplication*)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:(NSDictionary*)launchOptions {
  NSString* documentsPath = [NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES) firstObject];
  GCDWebDAVServer* davServer = [[GCDWebDAVServer alloc] initWithUploadDirectory:documentsPath];
  [davServer start];
  NSLog(@"Visit %@ in your WebDAV client", davServer.serverURL);
  return YES;
}

Serving a Static Website

GCDWebServer includes a built-in handler that can recursively serve a directory (it also lets you control how the “Cache-Control” header should be set):

#import "GCDWebServer.h"

int main(int argc, const char* argv[]) {
  @autoreleasepool {
    
    GCDWebServer* webServer = [[GCDWebServer alloc] init];
    [webServer addGETHandlerForBasePath:@"/" directoryPath:NSHomeDirectory() indexFilename:nil cacheAge:3600 allowRangeRequests:YES];
    [webServer runWithPort:8080];
    [webServer release];
    
  }
  return 0;
}

Using GCDWebServer

You start by creating an instance of the ‘GCDWebServer’ class. Note that you can have multiple web servers running in the same app as long as they listen on different ports.

Then you add one or more “handlers” to the server: each handler gets a chance to handle an incoming web request and provide a response. Handlers are called in a LIFO queue, so the latest added handler overrides any previously added ones.

Finally you start the server on a given port.

Understanding GCDWebServer Architecture

GCDWebServer is made of only 4 core classes:

‘GCDWebServer’ manages the socket that listens for new HTTP connections and the list of handlers used by the server.
‘GCDWebServerConnection’ is instantiated by ‘GCDWebServer’ to handle each new HTTP connection. Each instance stays alive until the connection is closed. You cannot use this class directly, but it is exposed so you can subclass it to override some hooks.
‘GCDWebServerRequest’ is created by the ‘GCDWebServerConnection’ instance after HTTP headers have been received. It wraps the request and handles the HTTP body if any. GCDWebServer comes with several subclasses of ‘GCDWebServerRequest’ to handle common cases like storing the body in memory or stream it to a file on disk. See GCDWebServerRequest.h for the full list.
‘GCDWebServerResponse’ is created by the request handler and wraps the response HTTP headers and optional body. GCDWebServer provides several subclasses of ‘GCDWebServerResponse’ to handle common cases like HTML text in memory or streaming a file from disk. See GCDWebServerResponse.h for the full list.

Implementing Handlers

GCDWebServer relies on “handlers” to process incoming web requests and generating responses. Handlers are implemented with GCD blocks which makes it very easy to provide your owns. However, they are executed on arbitrary threads within GCD so special attention must be paid to thread-safety and re-entrancy.

Handlers require 2 GCD blocks:

The ‘GCDWebServerMatchBlock’ is called on every handler added to the ‘GCDWebServer’ instance whenever a web request has started (i.e. HTTP headers have been received). It is passed the basic info for the web request (HTTP method, URL, headers...) and must decide if it wants to handle it or not. If yes, it must return a ‘GCDWebServerRequest’ instance (see above). Otherwise, it simply returns nil.
The ‘GCDWebServerProcessBlock’ is called after the web request has been fully received and is passed the ‘GCDWebServerRequest’ instance created at the previous step. It must return a ‘GCDWebServerResponse’ instance (see above) or nil on error.

Note that most methods on ‘GCDWebServer’ to add handlers only require the ‘GCDWebServerProcessBlock’ as they already provide a built-in ‘GCDWebServerMatchBlock’ e.g. to match a URL path with a Regex.

Advanced Example 1: Implementing HTTP Redirects

Here's an example handler that redirects “/” to “/index.html” using the convenience method on ‘GCDWebServerResponse’ (it sets the HTTP status code and ‘Location’ header automatically):

[self addHandlerForMethod:@"GET"
                     path:@"/"
             requestClass:[GCDWebServerRequest class]
             processBlock:^GCDWebServerResponse *(GCDWebServerRequest* request) {
    
  return [GCDWebServerResponse responseWithRedirect:[NSURL URLWithString:@"index.html" relativeToURL:request.URL]
                                          permanent:NO];
    
}];

Advanced Example 2: Implementing Forms

To implement an HTTP form, you need a pair of handlers:

The GET handler does not expect any body in the HTTP request and therefore uses the ‘GCDWebServerRequest’ class. The handler generates a response containing a simple HTML form.
The POST handler expects the form values to be in the body of the HTTP request and percent-encoded. Fortunately, GCDWebServer provides the request class ‘GCDWebServerURLEncodedFormRequest’ which can automatically parse such bodies. The handler simply echoes back the value from the user submitted form.

[webServer addHandlerForMethod:@"GET"
                          path:@"/"
                  requestClass:[GCDWebServerRequest class]
                  processBlock:^GCDWebServerResponse *(GCDWebServerRequest* request) {
  
  NSString* html = @" \
    <html><body> \
      <form name=\"input\" action=\"/\" method=\"post\" enctype=\"application/x-www-form-urlencoded\"> \
      Value: <input type=\"text\" name=\"value\"> \
      <input type=\"submit\" value=\"Submit\"> \
      </form> \
    </body></html> \
  ";
  return [GCDWebServerDataResponse responseWithHTML:html];
  
}];

[webServer addHandlerForMethod:@"POST"
                          path:@"/"
                  requestClass:[GCDWebServerURLEncodedFormRequest class]
                  processBlock:^GCDWebServerResponse *(GCDWebServerRequest* request) {
  
  NSString* value = [[(GCDWebServerURLEncodedFormRequest*)request arguments] objectForKey:@"value"];
  NSString* html = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"<html><body><p>%@</p></body></html>", value];
  return [GCDWebServerDataResponse responseWithHTML:html];
  
}];

Advanced Example 3: Serving a Dynamic Website

GCDWebServer provides an extension to the ‘GCDWebServerDataResponse’ class that can return HTML content generated from a template and a set of variables (using the format ‘%variable%’). It is a very basic template system and is really intended as a starting point to building more advanced template systems by subclassing ‘GCDWebServerResponse’.

Assuming you have a website directory in your app containing HTML template files along with the corresponding CSS, scripts and images, it's pretty easy to turn it into a dynamic website:

// Get the path to the website directory
NSString* websitePath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"Website" ofType:nil];

// Add a default handler to serve static files (i.e. anything other than HTML files)
[self addGETHandlerForBasePath:@"/" directoryPath:websitePath indexFilename:nil cacheAge:3600 allowRangeRequests:YES];

// Add an override handler for all requests to "*.html" URLs to do the special HTML templatization
[self addHandlerForMethod:@"GET"
                pathRegex:@"/.*\.html"
             requestClass:[GCDWebServerRequest class]
             processBlock:^GCDWebServerResponse *(GCDWebServerRequest* request) {
    
    NSDictionary* variables = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:@"value", @"variable", nil];
    return [GCDWebServerDataResponse responseWithHTMLTemplate:[websitePath stringByAppendingPathComponent:request.path]
                                                    variables:variables];
    
}];

// Add an override handler to redirect "/" URL to "/index.html"
[self addHandlerForMethod:@"GET"
                     path:@"/"
             requestClass:[GCDWebServerRequest class]
             processBlock:^GCDWebServerResponse *(GCDWebServerRequest* request) {
    
    return [GCDWebServerResponse responseWithRedirect:[NSURL URLWithString:@"index.html" relativeToURL:request.URL]
                                            permanent:NO];
    
];

Final Example: File Downloads and Uploads From iOS App

GCDWebServer was originally written for the ComicFlow comic reader app for iPad. It allow users to connect to their iPad with their web browser over WiFi and then upload, download and organize comic files inside the app.

ComicFlow is entirely open-source and you can see how it uses GCDWebUploader in the WebServer.m file.