http-serve

Rust helpers for serving HTTP GET and HEAD responses with hyper 0.13.x and tokio.

This crate supplies two ways to respond to HTTP GET and HEAD requests:

the serve function can be used to serve an Entity, a trait representing reusable, byte-rangeable HTTP entities. Entity must be able to produce exactly the same data on every call, know its size in advance, and be able to produce portions of the data on demand.
the streaming_body function can be used to add a body to an otherwise-complete response. If a body is needed, it returns a BodyWriter (which implements std::io::Writer). The caller should produce the complete body or call BodyWriter::abort, causing the HTTP stream to terminate abruptly.

Why two ways?

They have pros and cons. This chart shows some of them:

	`serve`	`streaming_body`
automatic byte range serving	yes	no (always sends full body)
backpressure	yes	no
conditional GET	yes	unimplemented (always sends body)
sends first byte before length known	no	yes
automatic gzip content encoding	no	yes

There's also a built-in Entity implementation, ChunkedReadFile. It serves static files from the local filesystem, reading chunks in a separate thread pool to avoid blocking the tokio reactor thread.

You're not limited to the built-in entity type(s), though. You could supply your own that do anything you desire:

bytes built into the binary via include_bytes!.
bytes retrieved from another HTTP server or network filesystem.
memcached-based caching of another entity.
anything else for which it's cheaper to compute the etag, size, and a byte range than the entirety of the data. (See moonfire-nvr's logic for generating .mp4 files to represent arbitrary time ranges.)

http_serve::serve is similar to golang's http.ServeContent. It was extracted from moonfire-nvr's .mp4 file serving.

Try the example:

$ cargo run --example serve_file /usr/share/dict/words

Authors

See the AUTHORS file for details.

License

Your choice of MIT or Apache; see LICENSE-MIT.txt or LICENSE-APACHE, respectively.