LightHTTP

Overview

LightHTTP is a lightweight HTTP server for .NET which can be used in the following scenarios:

• To mock HTTP APIs for unit testing
• To quickly set up a lightweight standard server for generic purposes

Features

• Supports a broad range of .NET runtimes (anything compatible with .NET Standard 2.0)
• Asynchronous handling of HTTP requests
• Easy and quick to use

Getting Started

Installation (via NuGet)

Install-Package LightHTTP -Version 1.0.2

Step-by-step

• Create a new instance of LightHttpServer.
• Set up prefixes to listen to. You can access the HttpListener instance via the LightHttpServer.Listener property.
• Register your handlers. Handlers can be registered by any of the Handles* extension methods on the LightHttpServer instance.
• Notice that handlers are executed with the same order as registered. The first handler that accepts the path will be executed.

Example

var server = new LightHttpServer();

// let's find an available port on the local machine, which is useful for unit tests
var testUrl = server.AddAvailableLocalPrefix();

// register our routes and handlers
server.HandlesPath("/health", context => context.Response.StatusCode = 200);
server.HandlesPath("/hello", async (context, cancellationToken) => {
	context.Response.ContentEncoding = Encoding.UTF8;
	context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain";
	var bytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("Hello World");
	await context.Response.OutputStream.WriteAsync(bytes, 0, bytes.Length);
});
server.HandlesStaticFile("/style.css", "../assets/style.css");

// finally start serving
server.Start();

// and call server.Dispose() when done

Why another HTTP server?

I was surprised when I could not find a valid HTTP server to use when writing tests. Every package I found was suffering from some random problem. Some were targeting a small range of frameworks, such as .NET Framework. One of them could not handle simultaneous connections! The other one didn't support handling requests asynchronously. Then I figured this is a simple task to do, so I'm going to do it properly myself.