Althttpd

The Althttpd Webserver
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Althttpd is a simple webserver that has run the https://sqlite.org/ website since 2004. Althttpd strives for simplicity, security, and low resource usage.

As of 2024, the althttpd instance for sqlite.org answers more than 500,000 HTTP requests per day (about 5 or 6 per second) delivering about 200GB of content per day (about 18 megabits/second) on a $40/month Linode. The load average on this machine normally stays around 0.5. About 19% of the HTTP requests are CGI to various Fossil source-code repositories.

Design Philosophy

Althttpd is usually launched from xinetd or systemd or similar. A separate process is started for each incoming connection, and that process is wholly focused on serving that one connection. A single althttpd process will handle one or more HTTP requests over the same connection. When the connection closes, the althttpd process exits.

Althttpd can also operate stand-alone. Althttpd itself listens on port 80 for incoming HTTP requests (or 443 for incoming HTTPS requests), then forks a copy of itself to handle each inbound connection. Each connection is still handled using a separate process. The only difference is that the connection-handler process is now started by a master althttpd instance rather than by xinetd or systemd.

Althttpd has no configuration file. All configuration is handled using a few command-line arguments. This helps to keep the configuration simple and mitigates worries about about introducing a security vulnerability through a misconfigured web server.

Because each althttpd process only needs to service a single connection, althttpd is single threaded. Furthermore, each process only lives for the duration of a single connection, which means that althttpd does not need to worry too much about memory leaks. These design factors help keep the althttpd source code simple, which facilitates security auditing and analysis.

For serving TLS connections there are two options:

  1. althttpd can be built with the ENABLE_TLS macro defined and linked to -lssl -lcrypto, then started with the --cert fullchain.pem and --pkey privkey.pem flags.

  2. althttpd can be started via an external connection service such as stunnel4, passing the -https 1 flag to althttpd to tell it that it is "indirectly" operating in HTTPS mode via that service.

The first option (using the built-in TLS) is preferred.

Source Code

The complete source code for althttpd is contained within a single C-code file with no dependences outside of the standard C library plus OpenSSL if the ENABLE_TLS option is chosen. Additionally, the build process requires VERSION.h, which is generated by the included Makefile.

The althttpd source code is heavily commented and accessible. It should be relatively easy to customize for specialized needs.

To build and install althttpd, select one of the build targets listed at the top of the Makefile, then run:

 make THAT_TARGET

If no target is provided it will assume that libssl is available and will attempt to build both build HTTP-only and HTTPS-aware binaries named althttpd and althttpsd, respectively. To install them, simply move them to the directory of your choice.

The corresponding build rules are trivial, so can be easily ported into other build infrastructure.

The SQLite website uses a static build so that there is no need to install OpenSSL on the server.

Setup

There are many wasy of running Althttpd on your system. Here are a few variations:

  1. Running Althttpd Using Systemd
  2. Running Althttpd Using Xinetd
  3. Running Althttpd As Its Own Standalone Server
  4. Running Althttpd Using Stunnel4

The above is not an exhaustive list. The basic idea is that every time a new socket connection appears on your webserver port (usually port 80 or 443), you launch a new copy of the althttpd process to deal with that connection.

A complete setup spec, including a list of all command-line options and configuration options is in a big header comment in the althttpd.c source code file.

Hosting Multiple Domains

Althttpd uses the HTTP_HOST header of each HTTP request to determine from where content should be served. The HTTP_HOST header is the domain name of the URL that prompted the web-browser to make the HTTP request. Althttpd makes a copy of this name, converts all ASCII alphabetic characters into lower-case and changes all other characters to "_" and then appends ".website". So for example, if the HTTP_HOST is "www.SQLite.org", the converted name will be "www_sqlite_org.website". Althttpd then looks for a directory with that name in its "-root" directory and delivers content out of that directory. If no such directory is found or if the HTTP request omits the HTTP_HOST header, then the "default.website" directory is used. Hence you can serve multiple websites from the same machine simply by having multiple *.website folders. On the Linode that serves the SQLite website, there are (at last count) 42 *.website folders and symbolic links, including:

Website Content

Within each *.website folder, ordinary files are delivered as static content. Executable files are run as CGI. Althttpd will not usually deliver files whose names begin with "." or "-". This is a security feature - see below.

GZip Content Compression

Althttpd has basic support for server-side content compression, which often reduces the over-the-wire cost of files by more than half. Rather than add a dependency on a compression library to althttpd, it relies on the website developer to provide content in both compressed and uncompressed forms.

When serving a file, if the client expresses support for gzip compression and a file with the same name plus a .gz extension is found, the gzipped copy of the file is served to the client with a response header indicating that it is gzipped. To the user, it appears as if the originally-requested file is served compressed. Under the hood, however, a different file is served.

Note that this feature only works for static files, not CGI.

Security Features

To defend against mischief, there are restrictions on names of files that althttpd will serve. Within the request URI, all characters other than alphanumerics and ",-./:~" are converted into a single "_". Furthermore, if any path element of the request URI begins with "." or "-" then althttpd always returns a 404 Not Found error. Thus it is safe to put auxiliary files (databases or other content used by CGI, for example) in the document hierarchy as long as the filenames being with "." or "-".

When althttpd returns a 404, it tries to determine whether the request is malicous and, if it believes so, it may optionally temporarily block the client's IP.

An exception: Though althttpd normally returns 404 Not Found for any request with a path element beginning with ".", it does allow requests where the URI begins with "/.well-known/". File or directory names below "/.well-known/" are allowed to begin with "." or "-" (but not with ".."). This exception is necessary to allow LetsEncrypt to validate ownership of the website.

Basic Authentication

If a file named "-auth" appears anywhere within the content hierarchy, then access to files in that directory requires HTTP basic authentication, as defined by the content of the "-auth" file. The "-auth" file applies only to the given directory, not recursively into subdirectories. The "-auth" file is plain text and line oriented. Blank lines and lines that begin with "#" are ignored. Other lines have meaning as follows:

Basic Authentication Examples

The http://www.sqlite.org/ website contains a "-auth" file in the toplevel directory as follows:

 http-redirect
 anyone

That -auth file causes all HTTP requests to be redirected to HTTPS, without requiring any further login. (Try it: visit http://sqlite.org/ and verify that you are redirected to https://sqlite.org/.)

There is a "-auth" file at https://fossil-scm.org/private/ that looks like this:

 realm Access To All Fossil Repositories
 http-redirect
 user drh drh:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Except, of course, the password is not a row of "x" characters. This demonstrates the typical use for a -auth file. Access is granted for a single user to the content in the "private" subdirectory, provided that the user enters with HTTPS instead of HTTP. The "http-redirect" line is strongly recommended for all basic authentication since the password is contained within the request header and can be intercepted and stolen by bad guys if the request is sent via HTTP.

Log File

If the -logfile option is given on the althttpd command-line, then a single line is appended to the named file for each HTTP request. The log file is in the Comma-Separated Value or CSV format specified by RFC4180. There is a comment in the source code that explains what each of the fields in this output line mean.

The fact that the log file is CSV makes it easy to import into SQLite for analysis, using a script like this:

CREATE TABLE log(
  date TEXT,             /* Timestamp */
  ip TEXT,               /* Source IP address */
  url TEXT,              /* Request URI */
  ref TEXT,              /* Referer */
  code INT,              /* Result code.  ex: 200, 404 */
  nIn INT,               /* Bytes in request */
  nOut INT,              /* Bytes in reply */
  t1 INT, t2 INT,        /* Process time (user, system) milliseconds */
  t3 INT, t4 INT,        /* CGI script time (user, system) milliseconds */
  t5 INT,                /* Wall-clock time, milliseconds */
  nreq INT,              /* Sequence number of this request */
  agent TEXT,            /* User agent */
  user TEXT,             /* Remote user */
  n INT,                 /* Bytes of url that are in SCRIPT_NAME */
  lineno INT             /* Source code line that generated log entry */
);
.mode csv
.import httplog.csv log

The filename on the -logfile option may contain time-based characters that are expanded by strftime(). Thus, to cause a new logfile to be used for each day, you might use something like:

 -logfile /var/logs/althttpd/httplog-%Y%m%d.csv

Client IP Blocking

If the --ipshun DIRECTORY option is included to althttpd and DIRECTORY is an absolute pathname (begins with "/") accessible from within the chroot jail, and if the IP address of the client appears as a file within that directory, then althttpd might return 503 Service Unavailable rather than process the request.

Banishment files are automatically created if althttpd gets a request that would have resulted in a 404 Not Found, and upon examining the REQUEST_URI the request looks suspicious. Any request that include /../ is considered a hack attempt, for example. There are other common vulnerability probes that are also checked. Probably this list of vulnerability probes will grow with experience.

The banishment files are automatically unlinked after 5 minutes/byte.

Banishment files are initially 1 byte in size. But if a banishment expires and then a new request arrives prior to 5 minutes per byte of block-file size, then the file grows by one byte and the mtime is reset.

The 5-minute banishment time is configurable at build-time by passing -DBANISH_TIME=N, where N is a number of seconds defaulting to 300.