HTTP/1.1 Server over Raw TCP (Go)

Overview

This project implements a low-level HTTP/1.1 server written in Go using raw TCP sockets, without relying on Go’s standard net/http package.

It closely follows:

• RFC 9110 – HTTP Semantics
• RFC 9112 – HTTP/1.1 Protocol

The goal is to provide a standards-compliant and educational implementation of HTTP built directly on top of TCP.

---

Features

• Full HTTP/1.1 request parsing

  • Request line, headers, body
  • Response/status line handling

• Chunked transfer encoding

  • Supports streaming data using hexadecimal-sized chunks
  • Proper handling of chunked bodies and terminating chunk

• Trailers for data integrity

  • Adds X-Content-SHA256 and X-Content-Length as HTTP trailers
  • Enables verification of streamed content

• Proxy streaming mode

  • Routes under /httpbin/... forward live HTTP streams from https://httpbin.org
  • Acts as a basic HTTP proxy on top of the custom TCP server

• Binary data streaming

  • Streams binary files (e.g. MP4 videos)
  • Uses correct Content-Type and Content-Length headers

• Extensible architecture

  • Designed to integrate with a Node.js/TypeScript backend and a React frontend
  • Can be used as the “data plane” for monitoring/observability tools

---

Architecture

• Transport layer: Raw TCP socket listener in Go
• Protocol layer: HTTP/1.1 parsing (request line, headers, body, chunked encoding)
• Application layer:
  • Static/binary file serving
  • Proxy routes (/httpbin/...)
  • Trailers and integrity metadata

flowchart LR
   subgraph CLIENT["Client Side"]
       C["Client (curl / browser)"]
   end

   subgraph GO["Go HTTP Server"]
       M["Server - main.go"]
       RP["Request Parser (package request)"]
       RW["Response Writer (package response)"]
       H["Handler Logic (myHandler)"]
       M --> RP --> RW --> H
   end

   subgraph EXT["External Service"]
       E["httpbin.org"]
   end

   C -- "TCP Request (HTTP/1.1)" --> M
   H -- "/httpbin/stream/x (proxy request)" --> E
   E -- "Chunked Body + Trailers" --> RW
   RW -- "Chunked Body + Trailers" --> C

Loading

Usage

Run the server

go run cmd/httpserver/main.go

By default, the server listens on:

localhost:42069

Test proxy streaming (raw chunked response)

echo -e "GET /httpbin/stream/100 HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: localhost:42069\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n" \
  | nc localhost 42069

Test binary data streaming (MP4)

Open your browser and navigate to:

http://localhost:42069/video/httptotcp.mp4

Author

Rayan Malki Software Engineering Student – École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS), Montréal

Passionate about: • Backend systems and distributed architectures • Networking and protocol design • Low-level programming and infrastructure tooling