Skip to content

Home

Welcome to the documentation site for Handy-Http. Here you'll find guides on how to get started with writing D web servers using Handy-Http, as well as detailed reference documentation for each of the various components that make up the project.

Warning

This documentation site is currently a work-in-progress. Please refer to each component's DDoc, or better yet, its source code, for a complete and accurate understanding of what it does.

About

Handy-Http is a collection of D lang source libraries that provide a means for you to run an HTTP server. It started originally as an all-in-one hobby project that Andrew created a few years ago to escape from the clutches of Java's Spring ecosystem. D offers arguably better developer ergonomics, as well as monumental performance improvements due to its static compilation to machine code. Since its inception, it's gone through a few iterations before settling on the modular architecture presented here.

Handy-Http has been deployed to serve a number of different uses by Andrew and others. For example, Andrew has built the following applications using it:

  • Finnow, a personal finance web application for tracking accounts across different financial institutions.
  • Teacher Tools, a web application with a suite of tools for helping teachers with mundane tasks like attendance and behavior tracking.
  • LiteList, Andrew's "todo app" made with Handy-Http and a Vue 3 frontend.

Your First Server

The easiest way to get started is to use the starter dependency, which automatically includes the components needed to boot up a simple HTTP server.

In the example below, we create a new D project named my-server, and add the handy-http-starter dependency to it. 

dub init my-server
cd my-server
dub add handy-http-starter

Then, edit your main D function like so:

main.d
import handy_http_starter;

void main() {
    startServer((ref request, ref response) {
        response.headers.add("Content-Type", "text/plain");
        response.headers.add("Content-Length", "12");
        response.outputStream.write(cast(ubyte[]) "Hello world!")
    });
}

In the above code, we take advantage of Handy-Http Starter's shortcuts to quickly boot up an HTTP server on http://localhost:8080 that responds to any request with Hello world!, by executing the provided delegate function whenever a request is received.

Next Steps

Now that you're able to build and run a basic HTTP server, read further on the different parts of Handy-Http to get a deeper understanding of how to build a production-ready application. Start by reading about Primitives, and then Transport.

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome! If you need to, please ask Andrew to give you an account for git.andrewlalis.com so that you can submit issues and create pull requests. Otherwise, simply send a message to Andrew regarding your concern or improvement if you don't want to bother with creating an account.

Info

Due to personal reasons, the author of Handy-Http, Andrew, has chosen not to host the project's source code on GitHub, and instead it's hosted in his own personal project site, git.andrewlalis.com. To allow for publishing on code.dlang.org, select repositories are mirrored to GitHub.