.Net and .Net Core both already provide fully functional HTTPS servers, as does IIS on Windows. But I found the need to make my own HTTP server in .Net for a plugin that I was making for a game (Kerbal Space Program, specifically). For my scenario, I was trying to limit the assemblies that I needed to add to the game to as few as possible. So I decided to build my own instead of adding references to the assemblies that had the functionality that I wanted.
For the class that will be my HTTP server, there are only two member variables needed. One to hold a reference to a thread that will accept my request and another for the TcpListener on which incoming requests will come.
Thread _serverThread = null;
TcpListener _listener;
I need to be able to start and top the server at will. For now, when the server stops all that I want it to do is terminate the thread and release any network resources that it had. In the Start function, I want to create the listener and start the thread for receiving the requests. I could have the server only listen on the loopback adapter (localhost) by using the IP address 127.0.0.1 (IPV4) or :1 (IPV6). This would generally be preferred unless there is a reason for external machines to access the service. I’ll need for this to be accessible from another device. Here I will use the IP address 0.0.0.0 (IPV4) or :0 (IPV6) . I’ll be using
public void Start(int port = 8888)
{
if (_serverThread == null)
{
IPAddress ipAddress = new IPAddress(0);
_listener = new TcpListener(ipAddress, 8888);
_serverThread = new Thread(ServerHandler);
_serverThread.Start();
}
}
public void Stop()
{
if(_serverThread != null)
{
_serverThread.Abort();
_serverThread = null;
}
}
The TcpListener has been created, but it isn’t doing anything yet. The call to have it listen for a request is a blocking request. The TcpListener will start listening on a different thread. When a request comes in, we read the request that was sent and then send a response. I’ll read the entire response and store it in a string. But I’m not doing anything with the request just yet. For the sake of getting to something that functions quickly, I’m going to hardcode a response
String ReadRequest(NetworkStream stream)
{
MemoryStream contents = new MemoryStream();
var buffer = new byte[2048];
do
{
var size = stream.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
if(size == 0)
{
return null;
}
contents.Write(buffer, 0, size);
} while (stream.DataAvailable);
var retVal = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(contents.ToArray());
return retVal;
}
void ServerHandler(Object o)
{
_listener.Start();
while(true)
{
TcpClient client = _listener.AcceptTcpClient();
NetworkStream stream = client.GetStream();
try
{
var request = ReadRequest(stream);
var responseBuilder = new StringBuilder();
responseBuilder.AppendLine("HTTP/1.1 200 OK");
responseBuilder.AppendLine("Content-Type: text/html");
responseBuilder.AppendLine();
responseBuilder.AppendLine("<html><head><title>Test</title></head><body>It worked!</body></html>");
responseBuilder.AppendLine("");
var responseString = responseBuilder.ToString();
var responseBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(responseString);
stream.Write(responseBytes, 0, responseBytes.Length);
}
finally
{
stream.Close();
client.Close();
}
}
}
To test the server, I made a .Net console program that instantiates the server.
namespace TestConsole
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
var x = new HTTPKServer();
x.Start();
Console.ReadLine();
x.Stop();
}
}
}
I rant the program and opened a browser to http://localhost:8888. The web page shows the response “It worked!”. Now to make it a bit more flexible. The logic for what to do with a response will be handled elsewhere. I don’t want it to be part of the logic for the server itself. I’m adding a delegate to my server. The delegate function will receive the request string and must return the response bytes that should be sent. I’ll also need to know the Mime type. I’ve made a class for holding that information.
public class Response
{
public byte[] Data { get; set; }
public String MimeType { get; set; } = "text/plain";
}
public delegate Response ProcessRequestDelegate(String request);
public ProcessRequestDelegate ProcessRequest;
I’m leaving the hard coded response in place, though I am changing the message to say that no request processor has been added. Generally, the code is expecting that the caller has registered a delegate to perform request processing. If it has not, then this will server as a message to the developer.
The updated method looks like the following.
void ServerHandler(Object o)
{
_listener.Start();
while(true)
{
TcpClient client = _listener.AcceptTcpClient();
NetworkStream stream = client.GetStream();
try
{
var request = ReadRequest(stream);
if (ProcessRequest != null)
{
var response = ProcessRequest(request);
var responseBuilder = new StringBuilder();
responseBuilder.AppendLine("HTTP/1.1 200 OK");
responseBuilder.AppendLine("Content-Type: application/json");
responseBuilder.AppendLine($"Content-Length: {response.Data.Length}");
responseBuilder.AppendLine();
var headerBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(responseBuilder.ToString());
stream.Write(headerBytes, 0, headerBytes.Length);
stream.Write(response.Data, 0, response.Data.Length);
}
else
{
var responseBuilder = new StringBuilder();
responseBuilder.AppendLine("HTTP/1.1 200 OK");
responseBuilder.AppendLine("Content-Type: text/html");
responseBuilder.AppendLine();
responseBuilder.AppendLine("<html><head><title>Test</title></head><body>No Request Processor added</body></html>");
responseBuilder.AppendLine("");
var responseString = responseBuilder.ToString();
var responseBytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(responseString);
stream.Write(responseBytes, 0, responseBytes.Length);
}
}
finally
{
stream.Close();
client.Close();
}
}
}
The test program now registers a delegate. The delegate will show the request and send a response that is derived by the time. I’m marking the response as a JSON response.
static Response ProcessMessage(String request)
{
Console.Out.WriteLine($"Request:{request}");
var response = new HTTPKServer.Response();
response.MimeType = "application/json";
var responseText = "{\"now\":" + (DateTime.Now).Ticks + "}";
var responseData = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(responseText);
response.Data = responseData;
return response;
}
static void Main(string[] args)
{
var x = new HTTPServer();
x.ProcessRequest = ProcessMessage;
x.Start();
Console.ReadLine();
x.Stop();
}
}
I grabbed my iPhone and made a request to the server. From typing the URL in there are actually two requests; there is a request for the URL that I typed for for an icon for the site.
Request:
Request:GET /HeyYall HTTP/1.1
Host: 192.168.50.79:8888
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 14_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) CriOS/91.0.4472.80 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive
Request:GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1
Host: 192.168.50.79:8888
Connection: keep-alive
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 14_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) CriOS/91.0.4472.80 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Language: en,en-US;q=0.9,ja-JP;q=0.8
To make sure this work, I loaded it into my game and made a request. The request was successful and I am ready to move on to implementing the logic that is needed for the game.
j2i.net 