File Serving

You have built an HTTP server capable of dynamic routing, concurrent processing, and chunked encoding! Now, let’s go back to the roots of the web: serving static files.

When a client requests an image, an HTML file, or a stylesheet, the server must read the file from the filesystem and return its contents in the Response Body.

Your Task

Because the tester runs inside a Docker container and your server runs on your host machine, they need a shared directory to test file serving. The tester will create a temporary file in this directory, and then ask your server to serve it!

Configure your server to serve files from a directory of your choice.

You must implement a new route: GET /files/{filename}.

When a client requests this endpoint, your server must:

1. Combine your chosen base directory with the {filename} from the URL.
2. Open the file on disk.
3. If the file exists, return a 200 OK response with:

• Content-Type: application/octet-stream
• Content-Length set to the size of the file.
• The file contents as the Response Body.

4. If the file does NOT exist, return a 404 Not Found response.

Note

application/octet-stream is the standard MIME type for an arbitrary binary file.

Important

Run the below docker command to test your solution. Note the -v flag: you must replace <YOUR_DIRECTORY> with the absolute path to the directory your server is serving from!

This mounts your host directory to /file_serving inside the container. The tester is hardcoded to create and request test files from this specific /file_serving path!

docker run \
  --rm \
  -v <YOUR_DIRECTORY>:/file_serving \
  --add-host host.docker.internal:host-gateway \
  codeberg.org/level0/buildit/http-server:latest \
  --addr host.docker.internal:8080 \
  --until file_serving