Multi-threaded HTTP Server

A dependency-free HTTP/1.1 server built from scratch in Python. It uses raw sockets and a configurable thread pool to serve static files, accept JSON uploads, reuse persistent connections, and handle concurrent clients.

What it implements

• GET for HTML, JSON, text, PNG, and JPEG resources
• POST /upload for JSON payloads
• HTTP/1.1 keep-alive connections with request and idle limits
• configurable host, port, and thread-pool size
• streamed binary transfers in 8 KiB chunks
• path-traversal and Host header checks
• request, error, and connection logging
• a 54-case client suite with three concurrent clients

Quick start

Requirements: Python 3.8 or newer. No third-party packages are required.

git clone https://github.com/Raghavendra1729-cell/Multithreaded-Http-Server.git
cd Multithreaded-Http-Server
mkdir -p resources/uploads testing/downloads
python3 server.py

The default server listens at http://127.0.0.1:8080 with 10 worker threads. The sample site is available at /, with additional resources under resources/.

To choose a different port, bind address, or pool size:

python3 server.py 9000
python3 server.py 8000 0.0.0.0 20

The positional arguments are PORT, HOST, and MAX_THREADS.

Try the API

curl http://127.0.0.1:8080/
curl -O http://127.0.0.1:8080/logo.png
curl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:8080/upload \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"name":"example","value":42}'

Uploaded JSON files are written to resources/uploads/.

Run the test suite

Keep the server running, then open a second terminal in the repository:

python3 testing/client.py

The suite starts three clients and covers static resources, binary integrity, JSON parsing and upload, error responses, and concurrency. It writes its report to testing/test_results.md.

Request flow

flowchart LR
    C[Client] --> L[Listening socket]
    L --> P[ThreadPoolExecutor]
    P --> R[Parse request]
    R --> G[GET static resource]
    R --> U[POST JSON upload]
    G --> S[Stream response]
    U --> S
    S --> K{Keep alive?}
    K -->|yes| R
    K -->|no| X[Close connection]

Loading

Setting	Default
Bind address	127.0.0.1
Port	8080
Worker threads	10
Header limit	8 KiB
Stream chunk	8 KiB
Idle timeout	30 seconds
Requests per connection	100

Security boundaries

The server rejects parent-directory traversal, absolute paths, invalid or missing Host headers, unsupported file extensions, unsupported methods, and non-JSON uploads. Request headers are size-limited and idle clients time out.

This is an educational server, not a production edge server. It does not provide TLS, authentication, compression, caching, HTTP/2, or multi-process scaling.

Project structure

.
├── server.py              # Socket server and request handlers
├── resources/             # Sample site, downloads, and JSON uploads
├── testing/
│   ├── client.py          # Concurrent integration test client
│   ├── test_results.md    # Latest saved report
│   └── downloads/         # Files produced by the test client
└── logs/                  # Checked-in example logs