/usr/local/perl/lib/site_perl/5.6.1/HTTP/Server/Simple.pm


NAME

HTTP::Server::Simple


SYNOPSIS

 use warnings;
 use strict;

 use HTTP::Server::Simple;

 my $server = HTTP::Server::Simple->new();
 $server->run();

However, normally you will sub-class the HTTP::Server::Simple::CGI module (see the HTTP::Server::Simple::CGI manpage);

 package Your::Web::Server;
 use base qw(HTTP::Server::Simple::CGI);

 sub handle_request {
     my ($self, $cgi) = @_;
     #... do something, print output to default
     # selected filehandle...
 }

 1;


DESCRIPTION

This is a simple standalone HTTP server. By default, it doesn't thread or fork.

It does, however, act as a simple frontend which can be used to build a standalone web-based application or turn a CGI into one.

(It's possible to use Net::Server to get threading, forking, preforking and so on. Autrijus Tang wrote the functionality and owes docs for that ;)

By default, the server traps a few signals:

HUP
When you kill -HUP the server, it does its best to rexec itself. Please note that in order to provide restart-on-SIGHUP, HTTP::Server::Simple sets a SIGHUP handler during initialisation. If your request handling code forks you need to make sure you reset this or unexpected things will happen if somebody sends a HUP to all running processes spawned by your app (e.g. by ``kill -HUP <script>'')

PIPE
If the server detects a broken pipe while writing output to the client, it ignores the signal. Otherwise, a client closing the connection early could kill the server

HTTP::Server::Simple->new($port)

API call to start a new server. Does not actually start listening until you call ->run().

lookup_localhost

Looks up the local host's hostname and IP address.

Stuffs them into

$self->{'localname'} and $self->{'localaddr'}

port [NUMBER]

Takes an optional port number for this server to listen on.

Returns this server's port. (Defaults to 8080)

host [address]

Takes an optional host address for this server to bind to.

Returns this server's bound address (if any). Defaults to undef (bind to all interfaces).

background

Run the server in the background. returns pid.

run

Run the server. If all goes well, this won't ever return, but it will start listening for http requests.

net_server

User-overridable method. If you set it to a Net::Server subclass, that subclass is used for the run method. Otherwise, a minimal implementation is used as default.

stdio_handle [FILEHANDLE]

When called with an argument, sets the socket to the server to that arg.

Returns the socket to the server; you should only use this for actual socket-related calls like getsockname. If all you want is to read or write to the socket, you should use stdin_handle and stdout_handle to get the in and out filehandles explicitly.

stdin_handle

Returns a filehandle used for input from the client. By default, returns whatever was set with stdio_handle, but a subclass could do something interesting here (see the HTTP::Server::Simple::Logger manpage).

stdout_handle

Returns a filehandle used for output to the client. By default, returns whatever was set with stdio_handle, but a subclass could do something interesting here (see the HTTP::Server::Simple::Logger manpage).


IMPORTANT SUB-CLASS METHODS

A selection of these methods should be provided by sub-classes of this module.

handler

This method is called after setup, with no parameters. It should print a valid, full HTTP response to the default selected filehandle.

setup(name => $value, ...)

This method is called with a name => value list of various things to do with the request. This list is given below.

The default setup handler simply tries to call methods with the names of keys of this list.

  ITEM/METHOD   Set to                Example
  -----------  ------------------    ------------------------
  method       Request Method        "GET", "POST", "HEAD"
  protocol     HTTP version          "HTTP/1.1"
  request_uri  Complete Request URI  "/foobar/baz?foo=bar"
  path         Path part of URI      "/foobar/baz"
  query_string Query String          undef, "foo=bar"
  port         Received Port         80, 8080
  peername     Remote name           "200.2.4.5", "foo.com"
  peeraddr     Remote address        "200.2.4.5", "::1"
  localname    Local interface       "localhost", "myhost.com"

headers([Header => $value, ...])

Receives HTTP headers and does something useful with them. This is called by the default setup() method.

You have lots of options when it comes to how you receive headers.

You can, if you really want, define parse_headers() and parse them raw yourself.

Secondly, you can intercept them very slightly cooked via the setup() method, above.

Thirdly, you can leave the setup() header as-is (or calling the superclass setup() for unknown request items). Then you can define headers() in your sub-class and receive them all at once.

Finally, you can define handlers to receive individual HTTP headers. This can be useful for very simple SOAP servers (to name a crack-fueled standard that defines its own special HTTP headers).

To do so, you'll want to define the header() method in your subclass. That method will be handed a (key,value) pair of the header name and the value.

accept_hook

If defined by a sub-class, this method is called directly after an accept happens.

post_setup_hook

If defined by a sub-class, this method is called after all setup has finished, before the handler method.

print_banner

This routine prints a banner before the server request-handling loop starts.

Methods below this point are probably not terribly useful to define yourself in subclasses.

parse_request

Parse the HTTP request line.

Returns three values, the request method, request URI and the protocol Sub-classed versions of this should return three values - request method, request URI and proto

parse_headers

Parse incoming HTTP headers from STDIN.

Remember, this is a simple HTTP server, so nothing intelligent is done with them :-).

This should return an ARRAY ref of (header => value) pairs inside the array.

setup_listener

This routine binds the server to a port and interface.

bad_request

This method should print a valid HTTP response that says that the request was invalid.


AUTHOR

Copyright (c) 2004-2005 Jesse Vincent, <jesse@bestpractical.com>. All rights reserved.

Marcus Ramberg <drave@thefeed.no> contributed tests, cleanup, etc

Sam Vilain, <samv@cpan.org> contributed the CGI.pm split-out and header/setup API.


BUGS

There certainly are some. Please report them via rt.cpan.org


LICENSE

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

 /usr/local/perl/lib/site_perl/5.6.1/HTTP/Server/Simple.pm