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https://github.com/anmonteiro/ocaml-h2
An HTTP/2 implementation written in pure OCaml
https://github.com/anmonteiro/ocaml-h2
http http2 ocaml
Last synced: 29 days ago
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An HTTP/2 implementation written in pure OCaml
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/anmonteiro/ocaml-h2
- Owner: anmonteiro
- License: bsd-3-clause
- Created: 2019-02-02T15:52:06.000Z (almost 6 years ago)
- Default Branch: master
- Last Pushed: 2024-04-28T01:24:41.000Z (7 months ago)
- Last Synced: 2024-05-22T21:26:45.170Z (6 months ago)
- Topics: http, http2, ocaml
- Language: OCaml
- Homepage:
- Size: 2.57 MB
- Stars: 305
- Watchers: 11
- Forks: 30
- Open Issues: 13
-
Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.md
- Changelog: CHANGES.md
- License: LICENSE
Awesome Lists containing this project
- awesome-list - ocaml-h2
README
# h2
h2 is an implementation of the
[HTTP/2](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7540) specification entirely in OCaml.
It is based on the concepts in
[http/af](https://github.com/inhabitedtype/httpaf), and therefore uses the
[Angstrom][angstrom] and [Faraday][faraday] libraries to implement the parsing
and serialization layers of the HTTP/2 standard. It also preserves the same API
as http/af wherever possible.
[angstrom]: https://github.com/inhabitedtype/angstrom
[faraday]: https://github.com/inhabitedtype/faraday
## Installation
Install the library and its dependencies via [OPAM][opam]:
[opam]: http://opam.ocaml.org/
```bash
opam install h2
```
## Usage
### Resources
First of all, the generated documentation lives
[here](https://ocaml.org/p/h2/latest/doc/index.html). It is recommended to browse it
and get to know the API exposed by `H2`.
There are also some examples in the [`examples`](./examples) folder. Most
notably, the [ALPN example](./examples/alpn) provides an implementation of a
common real-world use case:
It sets up a server that listens on 2 ports:
1. __port 8080__: redirects all incoming traffic to `https://localhost:9443`
2. __port 9443__: negotiates which protocol to use over the TLS
[Application-Layer Protocol Negotiation
(ALPN)](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7301) extension. It supports 2
protocols (in order of preference): `h2` and `http/1.1`.
If `h2` is negotiated, the example sets up a connection handler using
`h2-lwt-unix`. Otherwise the connection handler will serve HTTP/1.1 traffic
using [httpun](https://github.com/anmonteiro/httpun).
The ALPN example also provides a unikernel implementation with the same
functionality that runs on [MirageOS](https://mirage.io).
### A server example
We present an annotated example below that responds to any `GET` request and
returns a response body containing the target of the request.
```ocaml
open H2
(* This is our request handler. H2 will invoke this function whenever the
* client send a request to our server. *)
let request_handler _client_address reqd =
(* `reqd` is a "request descriptor". Conceptually, it's just a reference to
* the request that the client sends, which allows us to do two things:
*
* 1. Get more information about the request that we're handling. In our
* case, we're inspecting the method and the target of the request, but we
* could also look at the request headers.
*
* 2. A request descriptor is also what allows us to respond to this
* particular request by passing it into one of the response functions
* that we will look at below. *)
let { Request.meth; target; _ } = Reqd.request reqd in
match meth with
| `GET ->
let response_body =
Printf.sprintf "You made a request to the following resource: %s\n" target
in
(* Specify the length of the response body. Two notes to make here:
*
* 1. Specifying the content length of a response is optional since HTTP/2
* is a binary protocol based on frames which carry information about
* whether a frame is the last for a given stream.
*
* 2. In HTTP/2, all header names are required to be lowercase. We use
* `content-length` instead of what might be commonly seen in HTTP/1.X
* (`Content-Length`). *)
let headers =
Headers.of_list
[ "content-length", string_of_int (String.length response_body) ]
in
(* Respond immediately with the response body we constructed above,
* finishing the request/response exchange (and the unerlying HTTP/2
* stream).
*
* The other functions in the `Reqd` module that allow sending a response
* to the client are `Reqd.respond_with_bigstring`, that only differs from
* `Reqd.respond_with_string` in that the response body should be a
* bigarray, and `Reqd.respond_with_streaming` (see
* http://anmonteiro.com/ocaml-h2/h2/H2/Reqd/index.html#val-respond_with_streaming)
* which starts streaming a response body which can be written to
* asynchronously to the client. *)
Reqd.respond_with_string reqd (Response.create ~headers `OK) response_body
| meth ->
let response_body =
Printf.sprintf
"This server does not respond to %s methods.\n"
(Method.to_string meth)
in
Reqd.respond_with_string
reqd
(* We don't include any headers in this case. The HTTP/2 framing layer
* knows that these will be last frames in the exchange. *)
(Response.create `Method_not_allowed)
response_body
(* This is our error handler. Everytime H2 sees a malformed request or an
* exception on a specific stream, it will invoke this function to send a
* response back to the misbehaving client. Because there might not be a
* request for the stream (handing malformed requests to the application is
* strongly discouraged), there is also no request descriptor like we saw in
* the request handler above. In this case, one of the arguments to this
* function is a function that will start the response. It has the following
* signature:
*
* val start_response : H2.headers.t -> [`write] H2.Body.t
*
* This is also where we first encounter the concept of a `Body` (which were
* briefly mentioned above) that can be written to (potentially
* asynchronously). *)
let error_handler _client_address ?request:_ _error start_response =
(* We start the error response by calling the `start_response` function. We
* get back a response body. *)
let response_body = start_response Headers.empty in
(* Once we get the response body, we can immediately start writing to it. In
* this case, it might be sufficient to say that there was an error. *)
Body.Writer.write_string
response_body
"There was an error handling your request.\n";
(* Finally, we close the streaming response body to signal to the underlying
* HTTP/2 framing layer that we have finished sending the response. *)
Body.Writer.close response_body
let () =
(* We're going to be using the `H2_lwt_unix` module from the `h2-lwt-unix`
* library to create a server that communicates over the underlying operating
* system socket abstraction. The first step is to create a connection
* handler that will accept incoming connections and let our request and
* error handlers handle the request / response exchanges in those
* connections. *)
let connection_handler =
H2_lwt_unix.Server.create_connection_handler
?config:None
~request_handler
~error_handler
in
(* We'll be listening for requests on the loopback interface (localhost), on
* port 8080. *)
let listen_address = Unix.(ADDR_INET (inet_addr_loopback, 8080)) in
(* The final step is to start a server that will set up all the low-level
* networking communication for us, and let it run forever. *)
let _server =
Lwt_io.establish_server_with_client_socket listen_address connection_handler
in
let forever, _ = Lwt.wait () in
Lwt_main.run forever
```
### A client example
The following annotated client example performs a `GET` request to `example.com`
and prints the response body as it arrives.
```ocaml
open H2
module Client = H2_lwt_unix.Client
(* This is our response handler. H2 will invoke this function whenever the
* server has responded to our request. The `notify_response_received` argument
* is explained further down. *)
let response_handler notify_response_received response response_body =
(* `response` contains information about the response that we received. We're
* looking at the status to know whether our request produced a successful
* response, but we could also get the response headers, for example. *)
match response.Response.status with
| `OK ->
(* If we got a successful response, we're going to read the response body
* as it arrives, and print its fragments as we receive them. *)
let rec read_response () =
(* Scheduling a read of the response body registers two functions with
* H2:
*
* 1. `on_read`: this function will be called upon the receipt of a
* response body chunk (in HTTP/2 speak, a DATA frame). Our handling
* of these chunks is explained inline below.
*
* 2. `on_eof`: this function will be called once the entire response
* body has arrived. In our case, this is where we fulfill the promise
* that we're done handling the response.
*)
Body.Reader.schedule_read
response_body
~on_read:(fun bigstring ~off ~len ->
(* Once a response body chunk is handed to us (as a bigarray, and an
* offset and length into that bigarray), we'll copy it into a string
* and print it to stdout. *)
let response_fragment = Bytes.create len in
Bigstringaf.blit_to_bytes
bigstring
~src_off:off
response_fragment
~dst_off:0
~len;
print_string (Bytes.to_string response_fragment);
(* We need to make sure that we register another read of the response
* body after we're done handling a fragment, as it will not be
* registered for us. This is where our recursive function comes in
* handy. *)
read_response ())
~on_eof:(fun () ->
(* Signal to the caller of the HTTP/2 request that we are now done
* handling the response, and the program can continue. *)
Lwt.wakeup_later notify_response_received ())
in
read_response ()
| _ ->
(* We didn't get a successful status in the response. Just print what we
* received to stderr and bail early. *)
Format.eprintf "Unsuccessful response: %a\n%!" Response.pp_hum response;
exit 1
let error_handler _error =
(* There was an error handling the request. In this simple example, we don't
* try too hard to understand it. Just print to stderr and exit with an
* unsuccessful status code. *)
Format.eprintf "Unsuccessful request!\n%!";
exit 1
open Lwt.Infix
let () =
let host = "www.example.com" in
Lwt_main.run
( (* We start by resolving the address of the host we want to connect to. *)
Lwt_unix.getaddrinfo host "443" [ Unix.(AI_FAMILY PF_INET) ]
>>= fun addresses ->
(* Once the address for the host we want to contact has been resolved, we
* need to create the socket through which the communication with the
* remote host is going to happen. *)
let socket = Lwt_unix.socket Unix.PF_INET Unix.SOCK_STREAM 0 in
(* Then, we connect to the socket we just created, on the address we have
* previously obtained through name resolution. *)
Lwt_unix.connect socket (List.hd addresses).Unix.ai_addr >>= fun () ->
let request =
Request.create
`GET
"/"
(* a scheme pseudo-header is required in HTTP/2 requests, otherwise
* the request will be considered malformed. In our case, we're
* making a request over HTTPS, so we specify "https" *)
~scheme:"https"
~headers:
(* The `:authority` pseudo-header is a blurry line in the HTTP/2
* specificiation. It's not strictly required but most
* implementations treat a request with a missing `:authority`
* pseudo-header as malformed. That is the case for example.com, so
* we include it. *)
Headers.(add_list empty [ ":authority", host ])
in
(* The H2 API relies on callbacks to allow for a single, stable core to
* be used with different I/O runtimes. Because we're using Lwt in this
* example, we'll create an Lwt task that is going to help us transform
* the callback-calling style of H2 into an Lwt promise whenever we're
* done handling the response.
*
* If you're not familiar with Lwt or its `Lwt.wait` function, it's
* recommended you read at least the following bit before moving on:
* http://ocsigen.org/lwt/4.1.0/api/Lwt#VALwait. *)
let response_received, notify_response_received = Lwt.wait () in
(* Partially apply the `response_handler` function that we defined above
* to produce one that matches H2's expected signature. After this line,
* `response_handler` now has the following signature:
*
* val response_handler: Response.t -> [ `read ] Body.t -> unit
*)
let response_handler = response_handler notify_response_received in
(* HTTP/2 itself does not define that the protocol must be used with TLS.
* In practice, though, TLS is widely used in the Internet today (and
* that's a good thing!) and no serious deployments use plaintext HTTP/2.
* The following is a good read on why this is the case:
* https://http2-explained.haxx.se/content/en/part8.html#844-its-use-of-tls-makes-it-slower
*
* For us, this means that we need to make our request over TLS. H2, and
* more specifically `h2-lwt-unix`, provide a `TLS` module for both the
* client and the server implementations that rely on an optional
* dependency to ocaml-tls.
*
* We start by creating a connection handler. The `create_connection`
* function takes two arguments: a connection-level error handler (you
* can read more about the difference between connection-level and
* stream-level in H2 and HTTP/2 in general here:
* https://anmonteiro.com/ocaml-h2/h2/H2/Client_connection/index.html#val-create)
* and the file descriptor that we created above. *)
Client.TLS.create_connection_with_default ~error_handler socket
>>= fun connection ->
(* Once the connection has been created, we can initiate our request. For
* that, we call the `request` function, which will send the request that
* we created to the server, and direct its response to either the
* response handler - in case of a successful request / response exchange
* - or the (stream-level) error handler, in case our request was
* malformed. *)
let request_body =
Client.TLS.request connection request ~error_handler ~response_handler
in
(* The `request` function returns a request body that we can write to,
* but in our case just the headers are sufficient. We close the request
* body immediately to signal to the underlying HTTP/2 framing layer that
* we're done sending our request. *)
Body.Writer.close request_body;
(* Our call to `Lwt_main.run` above will wait until this promise is
* filled before exiting the program. *)
response_received )
```
## Conformance
One of h2's goals is to be 100% compliant with the HTTP/2 specification.
There are currently 3 mechanisms in place to verify such conformance:
1. Unit tests using the HPACK stories in the
[http2jp/hpack-test-case](https://github.com/http2jp/hpack-test-case)
repository
2. Unit tests using the test cases provided by the
[http2jp/http2-frame-test-case](https://github.com/http2jp/http2-frame-test-case)
repository.
3. Automated test runs (in CI) using the
[h2spec](https://github.com/summerwind/h2spec) conformance testing tool for
HTTP/2 implementations.
- These test all the `Reqd.respond_with_*` functions for conformance against
the specification.
## Performance
h2 aims to be a high-performance, memory-efficient, scalable, and easily
portable (with respect to different I/O runtimes) implementation. To achieve
that, it takes advantage of the unbuffered parsing interface in Angstrom using
off-heap buffers wherever possible, for both parsing and serialization.
Below is a plot of H2's latency profile at a sustained rate of 17000 requests
per second over 30 seconds, benchmarked using the
[vegeta](https://github.com/tsenart/vegeta) load testing tool.
## Development
This source distribution provides a number of packages and examples. The
directory structure is as follows:
- [`examples/`](./examples): contains example applications using the various
I/O runtimes provided in this source distribution.
- [`hpack/`](./hpack): contains the implementation of
[HPACK](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7541), the Header Compression
specification for HTTP/2.
- [`lib/`](./lib): contains the core implementation of this library, including
HTTP/2 frame parsing, serialization and state machine implementations.
- [`lib_test/`](./lib_test): contains various unit tests for modules in the
core h2 package.
- [`lwt/`](./lwt): contains an implementation of a Lwt runtime for h2
functorized over the specific input / output channel abstraction such that it
can work in either UNIX-like systems or MirageOS.
- [`lwt-unix/`](./lwt-unix): contains an Lwt runtime adapter for h2 that
communicates over UNIX file descriptors.
- [`mirage/`](./mirage): contains a Mirage runtime adapter for h2 that
allows using h2 to write unikernels that serve traffic over HTTP/2.
- [`spec/`](./spec): contains example implementations of servers using h2
that respond with the different provided APIs to be used for conformance
testing with the [h2spec](https://github.com/summerwind/h2spec) tool.
### Cloning the repository
```shell
# Use --recurse-submodules to get the test git submodules
$ git clone [email protected]:anmonteiro/ocaml-h2.git --recurse-submodules
```
### Using OPAM
To install development dependencies, pin the package from the root of the
repository:
```bash
$ opam pin add -n hpack .
$ opam pin add -n h2 .
$ opam install --deps-only h2
```
After this, you may install a development version of the library using the
install command as usual.
Tests can be run via dune:
```bash
dune runtest
```
## License
h2 is distributed under the 3-Clause BSD License, see [LICENSE](./LICENSE).
This source distribution includes work based on
[http/af](https://github.com/inhabitedtype/httpaf). http/af's license file is
included in [httpaf.LICENSE](./httpaf.LICENSE)