Python HTTP Server

A minimal HTTP server built from scratch in Python, to learn how HTTP requests and responses work under the hood without using any web framework.

Why?

• I wanted to understand how TCP sockets translate into HTTP transactions.
• I’m learning Python and wanted to build something “from the ground up” instead of relying on Flask or Django.
• Through this project, I learned about socket programming, basic HTTP methods, and response formatting.

Features

• Listens on port 8080 (configurable in server.py).
• Parses a raw HTTP GET request (just enough to extract the path).
• Serves a static index.html (and returns 404 for unknown routes).
• Returns “405 Method Not Allowed” for any non-GET request.

Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/KevinGarcia23/server cd python-http-server

Launch the server

python3 server.py

Then open your browser to http://localhost:8080

Learning Points

• How to use Python's socket module to accept TCP connections.
• How raw HTTP requests look (request line, headers, etc.) and how to build a valid HTTP response.
• The importance of correct status lines (e.g., HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\n\r\n) so that browsers properly render the page.
• How blocking I/O works—requests queue up if you don’t spawn new threads or async handlers.
• Basic debugging tips: printing out the raw request, splitting lines, etc.