Exercise 51: lessweb

We are nearing the end of the book, so I'm going to give you one project in the final two exercises. You are going to create a web server. In this exercise you simply learn about the Python http.server module and how to create a simple web server using it. You'll be given instructions and then expected to read the documentation to figure out how to do it. There won't be too much guidance as, by now, you should be able to do most everything on your own.

Once you've created your web server you will then write a set of tests to attempt to hack you web server. I'll give you some guidance on this in the Breaking It section, but by now you should be very comfortable in finding flaws in code you write.

Exercise Challenge

You'll need to read the Python 3 http.server documentation to start. You should also read the Python 3 http.client documentation as well as the documentation for Requests. You'll be using either requests or http.client to write tests for the http.server you create.

Next, your job is to create a web server using http.server that can do the following:

• Be configured from a configuration file

• Run continuously and handle requests it receives

• Serve up files from configured directories

• Respond to requests for websites and serve the correct content

• Log all requests coming in to a file to read later

If you read the example in the documentation you can probably get most of this working in a basic way. Part of this exercise is how to hack a naive web server, so you should just get it barely working and then we'll move to the next part.