UPDATE 2020:

This post is no longer accurate since I moved my website from Digital Ocean to Github Pages.

(this is actually how I ran my site in 2017 though)

So I wrote a web server…

… and you’re using it right now! But wait, what is it exactly?

Well, think of it like an nginx of sorts.

I named it plexer because I wanted to experiment with multiplexing sockets, and it’s written in one of my favorite languages, C.

plexer will happily compile on either Linux or Mac. Just run make and watch it go!

The current implementation only serves your current directory.

So if you were to compile and run it right now - you’ll see an index of the source files, something like this:

And that’s about it! I have it running on a cheap digital ocean droplet in a folder with a bunch of html (thats all this site is).

There are also some scripts for deploying plexer (packaged with my personal site) on debian. It’s set up with a cronjob to poll my github and automatically re-deploy when I push any changes.

In the future I plan to write more posts detailing all the interesting things I’ve learned (and am still learning) working on plexer.

Try it yourself:

git clone https://github.com/af-inet/plexer
cd plexer
make
./plexer -vp 8080 # verbose, run on port 8080

Security Concerns

Since plexer is strictly a for-fun project and isn’t peer-reviewed whatsoever, it should go without saying that you SHOULD NOT use it in production unless you’re looking for some fun.

(Personally I’m looking forward to the day someone exploits this)