yip

About

In here you'll find a high performance, multithreaded HTTP server that only knows how to do one thing: return the client's IP address. It is extremely lightweight, and should be able to handle an immense amount of traffic when completed.

OPTIONS
  -h --help             Display this help page.
  -p --port  <u_int>    Choose port number.
  -c --count <u_int>    Specify number of threads.
  -v --verbose          Be more verbose.
  -f --forward          Use "X-Forwarded-For" header to determine IP.

Installation

Arch Based Systems

The development version of yip can be found in the Arch User Repositories.

$ yay -S yip-git

Docker

The following compose file can be used a starting point. The image is based on Alpine Linux and lightweight.

version: "3.9"

services:
  yip:
    container_name: "yip"
    image: "ghcr.io/jenspots/yip:latest"
    ports:
      - "80:80"
    environment:
      - "THREADS=4"
      - "PORT=80" # Make sure this matches the port section
      - "FLAGS=--verbose" # See help page

Manual

Assuming you have cloned the repository and navigated into it, run:

# Temporary new directory
mkdir build
cd build

# Generate build files
cmake ..

# Build yip and install
cmake --build .
cmake --install .

Note that, despite yip being fairly platform-agnostic, there might be inconsistencies across different operating systems. For example, in macOS, socket.h does not scale properly beyond a single core. At least not when used as in yip. The main target is modern Linux using the GCC compiler.

Usage

The program is mainly written for use with curl, although any typical HTTP client will do. A successful reply is always of the following form.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: close
Content-length: 9

127.0.0.1

This allows the following curl query.

$ curl localhost
127.0.0.1 

If a server or connection issue were to arise, yip answers with status code 500. In this case, curl would return a non-zero code if used with the switch --fail.

HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error
Connection: close
Content-Length: 0

Motivation

I've grown tired of Googling "what's my IP address" since I don't like to rely on a GUI for such a trivial task, and I simply am unable to remember the domain name of that one service that works with an easy curl query. Given how small the implementation would be, I figured it would be fun to try and write a C program using pthread.h and socket.h.

Benchmarks

TODO