Nginx Clone

The goal of this project is to create a simplified version of the Nginx web server from scratch. This project is divided into multiple phases, each focusing on different aspects of web server functionality.

Phase 1 - TCP Server & Event Loop

• Implement TCP listener in C
• Make non-blocking I/O using epoll
• Handle multiple connections concurrently and echo back data

Phase 2 - HTTP Parser & Response

• Parse basic HTTP/1.1 requests manually
• Respond with static text & simple HTML
• Handle persistent connections

Phase 3 - Static File Server & Zero-Copy

• Serve files from disk
• use sendfile() syscall for zero-copy
• Implement basic MIME type handling

Phase 4 - Reverse Proxy & Load Balancing

• Forward requests to backend servers
• Implement round-robin or least-connections load balancing
• Stream responses without buffering everything in memory

Phase 5 - Worker Model & Config Reloading

• Fork multiple worker processes
• Use shared memory for statistics / counters / caching
• Implement config reload without dropping active connections

Phase 6 - TLS & Benchmarking

• Terminate HTTPS connections using OpenSSL
• Benchmark against Go version or nginx for curiousity

---

Step 1

Get C working

Step 2

Get a TCP server working

Step 3

Setting up epoll for non-blocking I/O

Step 4