This makes quark's vhost-handling very powerful while still being
simple.
Imagine you have a website with a subdomain you really want
to move back to your main domain.
Say the subdomain is called "old.example.org" and you want to serve it
under "example.org" but in the subdirectory "old/", i.e. you want to
redirect a request "old.example.org/subdir/" to "example.org/old/subdir".
For a vhost-handler that only takes 4 arguments for each vhost this is
actually pretty powerful.
As given in the config, we match a regex of hosts to a canonical host
which points to an internal directory.
Regexes are compiled on initialization, so we can error out early.
The rest is just modifications to use relative directories rather than
absolute ones, as we chdir() into the vhost directories dynamically.
Given we normalize the targets beforehand, there is no danger of
malformed requests escaping the vhost-context.
I noticed that the data structures didn't allow a flexible handling of
the code while trying to extend it to support if-modified-since-responses.
To tackle this, I refactored the data structures and proceeded to
rewrite the server from the ground up, implementing all present features
plus fixing a lot of bugs and introducing the 304 header handling as
requested by many people.
Please report bugs if you find them.
While at it, I refactored the build system as well and updated all
surrounding files respectively.
Roughly 700 LOC (half of the old quark on the Hiltjo branch) in size,
this rewrite supports partial content and other good stuff that will
make it fun again to use quark for simple static purposes.
The error checking is rigorous and strict and it will report proper
error codes back to the client whenever there was a problem or the
request was invalid in some way.
A cool feature is the support for listening on a UNIX-domain socket,
which will in the long run allow us to solve problems with virtual hosts
and other things in separate programs. But until then, this should be
robust enough for most use-cases.
This resets quark's version to 0, but this was no problem as there
haven't been any quark releases yet.
Feedback is appreciated.
It was sad to see that quark never got the attention it deserved in my
opinion. However, there were good reasons why that was the case.
The project lost focus by trying to add CGI support, which in all
fairness worked only half of the time.
For the rest of the use cases, a static server to make it dead simple to
publish a directory, it was also pretty bad, given it does not support
partial content. Seeking in a mp3 was impossible and it was very
frustrating.
Long ago we discussed in the team how exciting it would be to test out
new concepts of having a web server that listens on a UNIX-domain
socket, potentially allowing new concepts for realizing virtual hosts
and other things.
It took me half a year to make the decision to rewrite quark, so it is
now time to purge the repo and push the initial commit.
Change the behavior of docroot, which is now used as a prefix path for
all file operations related to static files. And add chrootdir, which is
just the old docroot behavior and allows to control the path into which
quark will chroot.
Not having properly distinct configuration variables for chroot,
document root and CGI root was specially annoying since commit 2822488
which allowed users to retrieve the CGI script or binary by just
guessing its path, since quark was chrooting into docroot before
anything else, and thus the CGI script/binary was in the user accessible
path.
This is implemented by moving the reqbuf buffer in the middle of a
bigger buffer, reqpath. That buffer contains the value of docroot at its
beginning and reqbuf simply points to the first byte after this value.
Now it should work. It doesn't make much sense to tweak the default
mime-type, given octet-stream is the default and there are
no real alternatives which would make sense.
Thanks Hiltjo and sin!
