Curly

Curly is an experimental event-driven HTTP server, written in C. I wrote it because I realized that while I can read C very well, know what idiomatic C looks like, have written a lot of C++, and I even interview people in C during my day job, I had never actually written a nontrivial program in plain C.

Philosophy

While this is intended to be efficient, secure, well-tested, production quality code, I do not recommend that you use it for anything but educational purposes. Everything Curly does, servers like Nginx probably do way better.

Also, though the features of the C language are restricted to C99 only, the code is probably not very portable. It uses several functions that are available in Linux only.

Naming

The name was chosen by aspell -l en dump master | grep ^c | shuf | less. When curly came up in the results, it seemed only too appropriate: it starts with C, C is a curly-braces language, and it contains "URL" in the middle.

Building

If you checked out from source, the following sequence of commands should build Curly successfully and produce a binary in src/curly:

./bootstrap
./configure
make

Use ./configure CC=colorgcc if you have colorgcc installed and want colourful output.

To run the tests:

make test

License

The code is under the three-clause BSD license; see the file LICENSE for details.