How to create tiny HTTP server in Java
tiny HTTP server
ServerSocket
java
For really small applications and if you don't want to include a server like Tomcat is useful to implement a lightweight socket HTTP Server.
The following tiny HTTP Server is designed to serve two paths but will be easy to extend:
- home page:
http://localhost:8000/ - hello page:
http://localhost:8000/hello/{name}
Additional, a page not found is returned to any other pages.
Server
The code is fairly simple, although there are a few important lines. In the main method a SocketServer object is created and then a while loop is used to keep the application alive and accept new client connections. In the run method, line 40 the entire request string is read, line by line.
Additional information can be found as comments in the code.
package com.admfactory.http;
import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.DataOutputStream;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.net.InetAddress;
import java.net.ServerSocket;
import java.net.Socket;
import java.util.StringTokenizer;
public class HTTPServer extends Thread {
private Socket client = null;
private BufferedReader inClient = null;
private DataOutputStream outClient = null;
public HTTPServer(Socket cl) {
client = cl;
}
public void run() {
try {
System.out.println("The Client " + client.getInetAddress() + ":" + client.getPort() + " is connected");
inClient = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(client.getInputStream()));
outClient = new DataOutputStream(client.getOutputStream());
String requestString = inClient.readLine();
String headerLine = requestString;
/** sometimes headerLine is null */
if (headerLine == null)
return;
StringTokenizer tokenizer = new StringTokenizer(headerLine);
String httpMethod = tokenizer.nextToken();
String httpQueryString = tokenizer.nextToken();
System.out.println("The HTTP request string is ....");
while (inClient.ready()) {
/** Read the HTTP request until the end */
System.out.println(requestString);
requestString = inClient.readLine();
}
if (httpMethod.equals("GET")) {
if (httpQueryString.equals("/")) {
/** return the home page */
homePage();
} else if (httpQueryString.startsWith("/hello")) {
/** return the hello page */
helloPage(
httpQueryString.substring(httpQueryString.lastIndexOf('/') + 1, httpQueryString.length()));
} else {
sendResponse(404, "<b>The Requested resource not found.</b>");
}
} else {
sendResponse(404, "<b>The Requested resource not found.</b>");
}
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
/**
* Method used to compose the response back to the client.
*
* @param statusCode
* @param responseString
* @throws Exception
*/
public void sendResponse(int statusCode, String responseString) throws Exception {
String HTML_START = "<html><title>HTTP Server in Java</title><body>";
String HTML_END = "</body></html>";
String NEW_LINE = "\r\n";
String statusLine = null;
String serverdetails = Headers.SERVER + ": Java Server";
String contentLengthLine = null;
String contentTypeLine = Headers.CONTENT_TYPE + ": text/html" + NEW_LINE;
if (statusCode == 200)
statusLine = Status.HTTP_200;
else
statusLine = Status.HTTP_404;
statusLine += NEW_LINE;
responseString = HTML_START + responseString + HTML_END;
contentLengthLine = Headers.CONTENT_LENGTH + responseString.length() + NEW_LINE;
outClient.writeBytes(statusLine);
outClient.writeBytes(serverdetails);
outClient.writeBytes(contentTypeLine);
outClient.writeBytes(contentLengthLine);
outClient.writeBytes(Headers.CONNECTION + ": close" + NEW_LINE);
/** adding the new line between header and body */
outClient.writeBytes(NEW_LINE);
outClient.writeBytes(responseString);
outClient.close();
}
/**
* Method used to compose the home page response to the client
*
* @throws Exception
*/
public void homePage() throws Exception {
StringBuffer responseBuffer = new StringBuffer();
responseBuffer.append("<b>HTTPServer Home Page.</b><BR><BR>");
responseBuffer.append("<b>To see the Hello page use : http://localhost:5000/hello/name</b><BR>");
sendResponse(200, responseBuffer.toString());
}
/**
* Method used to compose the hello page response to the client
*
* @throws Exception
*/
public void helloPage(String name) throws Exception {
StringBuffer responseBuffer = new StringBuffer();
responseBuffer.append("<b>Hello:").append(name).append("</b><BR>");
sendResponse(200, responseBuffer.toString());
}
/**
* class used to store headers constants
*
*/
private static class Headers {
public static final String SERVER = "Server";
public static final String CONNECTION = "Connection";
public static final String CONTENT_LENGTH = "Content-Length";
public static final String CONTENT_TYPE = "Content-Type";
}
/**
* class used to store status line constants
*
*/
private static class Status {
public static final String HTTP_200 = "HTTP/1.1 200 OK";
public static final String HTTP_404 = "HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found";
}
public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception {
ServerSocket server = new ServerSocket(5000, 10, InetAddress.getByName("127.0.0.1"));
System.out.println("HTTPServer started on port 5000");
/**
* loop to keep the application alive - a new HTTPServer object is
* created for each client
*/
while (true) {
Socket connected = server.accept();
HTTPServer httpServer = new HTTPServer(connected);
httpServer.start();
}
}
}Console output
The console will output for each client that is connecting something similar with the following printout (all the headers, the path, and some additional information).
HTTPServer started on port 5000
The Client /127.0.0.1:65169 is connected
The Client /127.0.0.1:65168 is connected
The HTTP request string is ....
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:5000
Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/57.0.2987.133 Safari/537.36
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch, br
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,ro;q=0.6
Cookie: JSESSIONID=d2nnb0znqcy11s6hgz86x5whq; _ga=GA1.1.1963935862.1484820976
AlexaToolbar-ALX_NS_PH: AlexaToolbar/alx-4.0.1
The Client /127.0.0.1:65170 is connected
Page output
Home page
Hello page
Page not found
