This is a minimal HTTP server for educational purposes, written in Python.
It serves the following URLs on http://localhost:8000:
/: A static page/favicon.ico: A static file,www/favicon.png/served: A simple page counter- Everything else will receive
404 Not Found
It is not a general-purpose (or production-ready) web server, serving arbitrary files.
This can be used to convey the following concepts:
- What is an HTTP server and how does it work?
- What is an HTML page?
- What are important HTTP headers?
- What are MIME (aka Content) Types and what are they used for?
- Can be used as a basis to talk about CSS and Javascript
- Can be used to talk about client-side (Javascript) and server-side (in this case, Python) computation
- Basic syntax
- Classes and inheritance (can be left abstract, but can also be used a basis to advance to the next level)
- Functions and methods,
self - Named parameters
- Reading files
- Global variables (and whether they are good or bad)
- Assertions
- Exceptions (i.e., if the image file is removed, an exception is raised and printed)
- Multi-line strings
- Format strings
- Difference between strings and bytes, introduction to Unicode (and UTF-8), possibly motivated by Mojibake
- When extending to serve arbitrary files based on the URL, care should be taken that
the URLs (after the initial
/) should not start with.nor contain/or\. Directory traversal could be shown. - When extending to return user input as part of the contents (e.g., include the
URL in the
404error message or provide a simple server-side computation, e.g., °C → °F conversion), escaping should be used. Cross-Site-Scripting (XSS) could be demonstrated.