🧠 Build Your Own HTTP Server (Java)

This repository contains my Java implementation of a fully functional HTTP/1.1 server, built as part of the Codecrafters "Build Your Own HTTP Server" challenge.

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📦 Features Implemented

• ✅ HTTP/1.1 protocol parsing (requests and responses)
• ✅ Persistent TCP connections with Connection: keep-alive and Connection: close
• ✅ /echo/<msg> endpoint (returns plain text or gzip-compressed based on headers)
• ✅ /user-agent endpoint (returns client's User-Agent)
• ✅ /files/<filename> (supports GET and POST for file retrieval and storage)
• ✅ Custom headers, status codes, and MIME types
• ✅ Multithreaded request handling using a thread pool

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🛠️ How to Run

Prerequisites

• Java 11+
• Maven

Run the server

./your_program.sh

Or using Maven directly:

mvn clean compile exec:java -Dexec.mainClass="Main"

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🧪 Test it manually (examples)

curl -v http://localhost:4221/
curl -v http://localhost:4221/user-agent
curl -v http://localhost:4221/echo/hello
curl -v --header "Accept-Encoding: gzip" http://localhost:4221/echo/compressed
curl -X POST --data "This is a file." http://localhost:4221/files/test.txt
curl http://localhost:4221/files/test.txt

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📁 Project Structure

• HTTPServer.java – Core server logic (multi-threaded socket handling, routing)
• HTTPRequest.java – Request parsing (method, path, headers, body)
• HTTPResponse.java – Response builder with status, headers, and body
• ContentType.java – MIME type handling
• Main.java – Entry point

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🎯 Why This Project?

This project was a deep dive into how real web servers work under the hood. It helped me learn:

• Low-level networking with Java Socket APIs
• HTTP request parsing and protocol rules
• How headers, compression, and status codes work
• Graceful connection handling and concurrency

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📚 References

• HTTP/1.1 RFC 2616
• Codecrafters.io - HTTP Server Challenge