Lightning in a Bottle

⚡ Lightning is a modern, robust web server written in C++.

Supported systems

Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty)

Installation

Ensure that git and Docker are both installed:

Then grab a copy of this repository:

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/UCLA-CS130/Mr.-Robot-et-al..git

Then, to build a Lightning binary using Dockerfile: (prepend sudo to the following two commands if you're running this on Linux)

make build

And to start the Lightning server locally (using Dockerfile.run):

make local_deploy

To update our AWS instance of Lightning (this should ONLY be run on master branch, which is kept always-working):

make deploy

Manually Install Dependencies

If you wish to avoid the use of Docker and would prefer to manually install everything, we have the following dependencies:

• Boost: used for socket networking as well as string manipulation.
• lcov: used to create test coverage webpages.
• HTTPie: a handy tool for checking HTTP connections that we use in our integration test.

To install these dependencies, simply run:

./configure.sh

If the execute permissions on the configure.sh script prevent it from running, change them to read + execute using:

chmod 0755 configure.sh

Usage

To following is an example of how to build and run LightningServer. It takes in one argument, the server configuration file (the format of which can be found in the wiki).

$ make
$ ./lightning [config file]

A basic config file that we included is simple_config. It contains configurations for all our curent handlers, and specifies port 8080.

To clean everything up:

$ make clean

To run only integration tests:

$ make integration_test

To run both unit and integration tests (make sure to run make clean first if its not the first time running the tests):

$ make test

Contributing

Soure Code Layout

The current layout of our source files is laid out below. The assets to be served by the static handler are stored in assets/. The server can be configured using the configs stored in our root directory. deploy is used during deployment into images by Docker. Other libraries we use can be found in their respective submodules.

src/
test/
assets/
deploy/
simple_config
example_config

# Other libraries
nginx-configparser/
  gtest/
cpp-markdown/

The following illustrates the hierarchy of .cc files as they are called when running the server.

lightning_main
  lightning_server      (listens on socket specified by config file)
    server_config       (wrapper for NginxConfig to make it easier to get properties)
    request_router      (initializes long-lived handlers)
      request
      response
      request_handlers

Adding a Handler

In order to add a new handler, you will need to first create a class definition and implementation for it in request_handlers.h and request_handlers.cc files. We have a abstract base class called RequestHandler that contains the enums and initializes the handler. Your handler will be derived from this class. EchoRequestHandler is a good example of how this can be done. Each new handler will call the init member function and implement the handleRequest member function.

Once you are done with making your handler, you can use it by running the server with a config file that gives your handler a path. See simple_config for examples of previous handler paths.

Authors:

• Alex Fong
• Frank Chen
• Ky-Cuong Huynh