httpbeast

A highly performant, multi-threaded HTTP 1.1 server written in Nim.

The main goal of this project is performance, when it was started the goal was to get the fastest possible HTTP server written in pure Nim, it has held the title of the fastest Nim HTTP server since its initial release. In 2018 HttpBeast reached the top 10 in the TechEmpower benchmarks beating many established HTTP servers implemented in other programming languages. Httpbeast has been used successfully in many projects, for example the Nim Forum.

ℹ️ Unless you know what you're doing (for example writing something resource constrained or your own web framework), you are better off using Jester (which is built on Httpbeast) or another web framework.

ℹ️ This HTTP server has been designed to utilise epoll-like OS APIs and as such does not support Windows by-design.

⚠️ This library is not yet hardened against common HTTP security exploits. If you're using it in production you should do so behind a reverse proxy like nginx.

Features

Current features include:

• Built on the Nim selectors module which makes efficient use of epoll on Linux and kqueue on macOS.
• Automatic parallelization, just make sure to compile with --threads:on.
• Support for HTTP pipelining.
• On-demand parser so that only the requested data is parsed.
• Integration with Nim's asyncdispatch allowing async/await to be used in the request callback whenever necessary.

Getting started

Create a helloHttp.nimble file:

# Package

version       = "0.1.0"
author        = "Your Name"
description   = "Your Description"
license       = "MIT"
srcDir        = "src"
bin           = @["helloHttp"]


# Dependencies

requires "nim >= 1.0.0"
requires "httpbeast >= 0.4.0"

Create a src/helloHttp.nim file:

import options, asyncdispatch

import httpbeast

proc onRequest(req: Request): Future[void] =
  if req.httpMethod == some(HttpGet):
    case req.path.get()
    of "/":
      req.send("Hello World")
    else:
      req.send(Http404)

run(onRequest)

Run via: nimble c -r helloHttp.nim