libmicrohttpd/README

About
=====

GNU libmicrohttpd is a GNU package offering a C library that provides
a compact API and implementation of an HTTP 1.1 web server (HTTP 1.0
is also supported).  GNU libmicrohttpd only implements the HTTP 1.1
protocol.  The main application must still provide the application
logic to generate the content.

GNU libmicrohttpd is dual-licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public
License (LGPLv2.1+) and the eCos License.  See COPYING for details.


Joining GNU
===========

This is a GNU program, developed by the GNU Project and part of the
GNU Operating System. If you are the author of an awesome program and
want to join us in writing Free Software, please consider making it an
official GNU program and become a GNU maintainer.  You can find
instructions on how to do so at http://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.
We are looking forward to hacking with you!


Installation
============

See INSTALL for generic installation instructions.

If you are using Git, run "./bootstrap" to create configure.

In order to run the testcases, you need a recent version of libcurl.
libcurl is not required if you just want to install the library.

Especially for development, do use the MHD_USE_ERROR_LOG option to get
error messages.


Configure options
=================


If you are concerned about space, you should set "CFLAGS" to "-Os
-fomit-frame-pointer" to have gcc generate tight code.

You can use the following options to disable certain MHD features:

--disable-https: no HTTPS / TLS / SSL support (significant reduction)
--disable-messages: no error messages (they take space!)
--disable-postprocessor: no MHD_PostProcessor API
--disable-dauth: no digest authentication API
--disable-epoll: no support for epoll, even on Linux

The resulting binary should be about 30-40k depending on the platform.


Portability
===========

The latest version of libmicrohttpd will try to avoid SIGPIPE on its
sockets.  This should work on OS X, Linux and recent BSD systems (at
least).  On other systems that may trigger a SIGPIPE on send/recv, the
main application should install a signal handler to handle SIGPIPE.

libmicrohttpd should work well on GNU/Linux, W32, FreeBSD, Darwin,
NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris/OpenIndiana, and z/OS.
Note that HTTPS is not supported on z/OS (yet).  We also have reports
of users using it on vxWorks.


Development Status
==================

This is a beta release for libmicrohttpd.  Before declaring the
library stable, we should have testcases for the following features:

- HTTP/1.1 pipelining (need to figure out how to ensure curl pipelines
  -- and it seems libcurl has issues with pipelining,
  see http://curl.haxx.se/mail/lib-2007-12/0248.html)
- resource limit enforcement
- client queuing early response, suppressing 100 CONTINUE
- chunked encoding to validate handling of footers
- more testing for SSL support
- MHD basic and digest authentication

In particular, the following functions are not covered by 'make check':
- mhd_panic_std (mhd_panic.c); special case (abort)
- parse_options (daemon.c)
- MHD_get_version (daemon.c)


Note that the working library is in src/microhttpd/ with the API in
src/include/microhttpd.h.  An *experimental* (read: not yet working
at all) newer implementation is in src/lib/, with the new API in
src/include/microhttpd2.h.  The experimental code will need MUCH
more testing and development, you are strongly advised to stick
to microhttpd.h unless you are a MHD developer!