GenHTTP Webserver

GenHTTP is a lightweight web server written in pure C# with only a few dependencies to 3rd-party libraries. The main purpose of this project is to quickly create feature rich web applications and web services written in .NET 6/7/8, allowing developers to concentrate on the functionality rather than on messing around with configuration files, CSS or bundling JS files. Projects are mainly written in .NET, which allows C# developers to use their familiar toolset in web application development as well.

As an example, the website of this project is hosted on a Raspberry Pi: genhttp.org

Features

Setup new webservices or websites in a couple of minutes using project templates
Embed web services and applications into your existing console, service, WPF or WinForms application
Projects are fully described in code - no configuration files needed
Optimized out of the box (e.g. by bundling resources or compressing results)
Small memory and storage footprint
Several themes available to be chosen from
Grade A+ security level according to SSL Labs
Can be used to mock HTTP responses in component testing (see MockH)

Getting Started

This section shows how to create a new project from scratch using project templates and how to extend your existing application by embedding the GenHTTP engine.

New Project

Project templates can be used to create apps for typical use cases with little effort. After installing the .NET SDK and the templates via dotnet new -i GenHTTP.Templates in the terminal, the templates are available via the console or directly in Visual Studio:

To create a project by using the terminal, create a new folder for your app and use one of the following commands:

Template	Command
REST Webservice	`dotnet new genhttp-webservice`
REST Webservice (single file)	`dotnet new genhttp-webservice-minimal`
Website	`dotnet new genhttp-website`
Website (Static HTML)	`dotnet new genhttp-website-static`
Website (MVC + Razor)	`dotnet new genhttp-website-mvc-razor`
Website (MVC + Scriban)	`dotnet new genhttp-website-mvc-scriban`

After the project has been created, you can run it via dotnet run and access the server via http://localhost:8080.

Extending Existing Apps

If you would like to extend an existing .NET application, just add a nuget reference to the GenHTTP.Core nuget package. You can then spawn a new server instance with just a few lines of code:

var content = Content.From(Resource.FromString("Hello World!"));

using var server = Host.Create()
                       .Handler(content)
                       .Defaults()
                       .Start(); // or .Run() to block until the application is shut down

When you run this sample it can be accessed in the browser via http://localhost:8080.

Next Steps

The documentation provides a step-by-step starting guide as well as additional information on how to implement webservices, minimal webservices, websites, MVC style projects, or single page applications and how to host your application via Docker.

If you encounter issues implementing your application, feel free to join our Discord community to get help.

Building the Server

To build the server from source, clone this repository and run the playground project launcher for .NET 8:

git clone https://github.com/Kaliumhexacyanoferrat/GenHTTP.git
cd ./GenHTTP/Playground
dotnet run

This will build the playground project launcher with all the server dependencies and launch the server process on port 8080. You can access the playground in the browser via http://localhost:8080.

Contributing

Writing a general purpose web application server is a tremendous task, so any contribution is very welcome. Besides extending the server core, you might want to

Extend the content capabilities of the server (e.g. by adding a new serialization format or rendering engine)
Add a new theme
Refine our project templates
Perform code reviews
Analyze the performance or security of the server
Clarfify and extend our tests
Improve the documentation on the website or in code

If you would like to contribute, please also have a look at the contribution guidelines and the good first issues.

History

The web server was originally developed in 2008 to run on a netbook with an Intel Atom processor. Both IIS and Apache failed to render dynamic pages on such a slow CPU back then. The original project description can still be found on archive.org. In 2019, the source code has been moved to GitHub with the goal to rework the project to be able to run dockerized web applications written in C#.

Thanks

.NET for a nice platform

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