DreamServer

DreamServer is a lightweight HTTP reverse proxy and static file server written from scratch in Go. It is designed as an educational exploration into networking, HTTP parsing, and proxying internals—while keeping a clear path toward production-ready use.

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✨ Features

• Custom HTTP parser – handles raw TCP connections and full HTTP message parsing.
• Reverse proxy mode – forward requests to backend services (e.g. djangoserver.com:8000) with transparent header handling.
• Static file server – serves files from a configurable root (staticfiles/) with automatic MIME type detection.
• Structured logging – request and response logs include latency, status, bytes sent, and request IDs (UUID).
• Error handling – gracefully responds with 400 Bad Request or 404 Not Found using fallback HTML pages.
• Connection management – keep-alive support, versioned headers, and automatic close on errors.

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🚧 Work in Progress

DreamServer is still evolving and not yet production ready. The current focus areas are:

• Complete HTTP message parsing
• Complete support for all major HTTP methods (POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.)
• Static File Serving
• More robust reverse proxy (streaming, TLS termination, retries)
• Configurable routing for multiple backends
• File caching and gzip compression for static assets
• Structured logs written to a file (/var/log/dreamserver/access.log)
• Graceful shutdown and concurrent connection limits
• Security hardening (TLS, request size limits, input sanitization)

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📦 Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Go 1.21+
• Linux or macOS (Windows partially supported)

Build

git clone https://github.com/yourname/dreamserver
cd dreamserver
go build -o dreamserver

Run

./dreamserver

By default, DreamServer listens on :8080 and serves files from staticfiles/.

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🔧 Example Usage

Serving Static Files

Put an index.html in staticfiles/, then open http://localhost:8080/.

Reverse Proxying

Requests to http://djangoserver.com:8080/* are proxied to a Django backend at djangoserver.com:8000. Redirects are automatically followed.

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📊 Logging

Each request generates a structured log entry with:

• Request ID
• Client IP
• Method, path, host
• Response status, bytes sent
• Latency (ms)

Example:

[INFO] DREAM_SERVER REQUEST | id=1c4f... | ip=127.0.0.1 | method=GET | path=/ | status=200 | bytes=5120 | latency=3ms

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🧩 Project Goals

DreamServer is both a learning playground and a potential foundation for a real production server. The long-term vision includes:

• Secure, configurable, high-performance reverse proxying
• Production-ready observability (structured logs, metrics, tracing)
• HTTP/1.1 support
• Pluggable middleware for authentication, caching, rate limiting

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📚 Why This Project?

Reinventing the wheel here isn’t wasteful—it’s deliberate. DreamServer is meant to demonstrate deep system knowledge: from raw TCP handling, HTTP parsing, and state management, to building the same abstractions used in Nginx, Caddy, or HAProxy.

This is not just “toy code.” It’s a portfolio piece to show understanding of:

• Systems programming with Go
• Networking and TCP/IP
• HTTP internals
• Production-grade design tradeoffs

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🤝 Contributing

Contributions, bug reports, and feedback are welcome! This project is still under active development, and ideas for features or improvements are highly encouraged.

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📜 License

MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

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