Minimal HTTP Server in Go (Built From Scratch Over TCP)

A lightweight HTTP/1.1 server implemented directly over TCP sockets without using Go’s net/http package. The goal is to understand the protocol from first principles: request parsing, header handling, connection lifecycle, and streaming responses.

The project also includes a reverse-proxy style endpoint that forwards requests to httpbin.org and streams chunked responses back to the client.

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Features

HTTP/1.1 Request Parsing

• Manual parsing of:
  • Request line (method, path, version)
  • Headers (case-insensitive)
  • Message body
• Graceful handling of malformed input with appropriate error responses.

Persistent Connections

• Basic keep-alive behavior
• Clean connection teardown
• Concurrency model using goroutines

Streaming Support

• /httpbin/stream/<N> forwards to
  https://httpbin.org/stream/<N>
• Response body is streamed back to the client without buffering, preserving upstream chunking behavior.

Reverse Proxy Behavior

• For paths beginning with /httpbin/stream, the server:
  • Forwards the request to upstream
  • Streams upstream bytes as they arrive
  • Preserves chunked transfer semantics

From-Scratch HTTP Server Core

• Built directly using:
  • net.Listen
  • net.Conn
  • Manual reading/parsing with bufio.Reader
  • Scratch implementation of my own reader and writer for custom usablity

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Why This Project Exists

This project explores what usually stays hidden behind high-level web frameworks. It answers questions like:

• What actually arrives over a TCP socket when a browser says “GET /”?
• How does chunked transfer encoding behave under streaming conditions?
• What does an HTTP server need to handle before frameworks take over?
• What are different http protocols?
• What is difference between TCP and UDP?

It’s a learning-driven, low-level implementation for building real intuition about networking and protocols.

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