Starship

A Fast Webserver written in Elixir.

Status

Currently, this is very much in alpha. I've taken the great work done by @van163 as a starting point and inspiration, in order to build up a fast Webserver in pure Elixir.

I've fully rewritten the Elixir branch of @van163's work, cleaning it up, adding more Elixir structure and features to the project, splitting things into smaller and simpler functions, and adding proper functionalities to support various HTTP standards that the original server didn't support.

Installation

If available in Hex, the package can be installed by adding starship to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:starship, "~> 0.0.1"}
  ]
end

Documentation can be generated with ExDoc and published on HexDocs. Once published, the docs can be found at https://hexdocs.pm/starship.

Current Features

• Simple support for HTTP/1.1 and below (No HTTP/2.0 or HTTP/3.0 yet)
• SSL (by passing SSL options to the config, which are subsequently passed to the :ssl erlang underlying application)
• Websockets
  • I've tested basic text frames, and I've built out the functionality for fragmentations, however I need to find a way to test it
  • Binary frames are currently not implemented

Roadmap/TODOS

• HTTP Standards
  • [x] Support for HTTP/1.1 and below.
    • [x] On HTTP/0.9 requests, we must close the connection on the server side after sending the response.
    • [x] On HTTP/1.0 requests, we must close the connection unless a "Connection: Keep-Alive" Header is received from the client and then subsequently sent by the server.
    • [x] On HTTP/1.1 requests, we only close the connection if a "Connection: Close" Header is received from the client, or if we send a "Connection: Close" Header from the server.
  • [ ] Support for HTTP/2.0.
    • [ ] Read the HTTP/2.0 standards and RFCs in order to support it correctly
  • [x] Document how SSL options need to look in order to pass them through the configuration in the initial Starship.warp_in function.
• Optimize the parsing of request data for fastest performance.
  • [x] Header Parsing and Organizing
  • [ ] Cookie Parsing and Organizing
  • [ ] Body Parsing and Organizing
• Websocket Standards
  • [x] Make sure that Websocket Handshake and Handlers return the correct values for Starship.Reactor.connection_state.
  • [ ] Parsing Websocket Frames.
    • [ ] Receiving Data Frames:
      • [x] Text
      • [ ] Binary
        • Starship should be able to decode the data frames as binary, however, the application using Starship needs to be able to receive and handle binary data, otherwise we will close the connection and return a termination error code
      • [x] Ping
      • [x] Continuation/Fragmentation
      • [x] Close
    • [ ] Generate Server Sent Data Frames:
      • [x] Text
      • [ ] Binary
        • Check if encoding server sent data frames as binary is part of the standard
        • If it is in the standard, Starship should be able to encode the data frames as binary.
      • [x] Pong
      • [x] Close
• Extras
  • [ ] Write macros for building simple APIs (similar to how Plug works for Cowboy)
    • [ ] Every Starship needs a Pilot
    • Alternatively, write an adapter for Plug
  • [ ] Create benchmarks on all aspects and write them out

Credits

The main credit here goes to @van163 for being frustrated with Elixir's standings in various benchmarks. After seeing his comments about this and his initial work, I decided to undertake this as a project in order to learn more about how web servers work and Elixir as a whole.

License Remarks

@van163's original project was done under a GNU GPLv3 License. I initially forked his repository in order to have a copy of the code for inspiration and to help me if I was getting stuck anywhere, but I ended up simply writing my code in the same repository.

Since the entirety of the project is being written from scratch, and my intention was always (and still is) only to use @van163's work to help me understand how to write low level TCP code in Elixir and Erlang, I am going to be changing the license from the GNU GPLv3 License to my preferred MIT License.

If someone sees an issue with this and has a valid argument, please open an issue, and I will gladly change it back to the GNU GPLv3 if it's necessary.