9 - A mount can be protected by Basic Auth... in lwsws it looks like this
13 "mountpoint": "/basic-auth",
14 "origin": "file://_lws_ddir_/libwebsockets-test-server/private",
15 "basic-auth": "/var/www/balogins-private"
19 The text file named in `basic-auth` contains user:password information
22 See README.lwsws.md for more information.
24 - RFC7233 RANGES support in lws server... both single and multipart.
25 This allows seeking for multimedia file serving and download resume.
26 It's enabled by default but can be disabled by CMake option.
28 - On Linux, lwsws can reload configuration without dropping ongoing
29 connections, when sent a SIGHUP. The old configuration drops its
30 listen sockets so the new configuration can listen on them.
31 New connections connect to the server instance with the new
32 configuration. When all old connections eventually close, the old
33 instance automatically exits. This is equivalent to
34 `systemctl reload apache`
36 - New `adopt` api allow adoption including SSL negotiation and
37 for raw sockets and file descriptors.
39 - Chunked transfer encoding supported for client and server
41 - Adaptations to allow operations inside OPTEE Secure World
43 - ESP32 initial port - able to do all test server functions. See
46 - Serving gzipped files from inside a ZIP file is supported... this
47 includes directly serving the gzipped content if the client
48 indicated it could accept it (ie, almost all browsers) saving
49 bandwidth and time. For clients that can't accept it, lws
50 automatically decompresses and serves the content in memory-
51 efficient chunks. Only a few hundred bytes of heap are needed
52 to serve any size file from inside the zip. See README.coding.md
54 - RAW file descriptors may now be adopted into the lws event loop,
55 independent of event backend (including poll service).
58 - RAW server socket descriptors may now be enabled on the vhost if
59 the first thing sent on the connection is not a valid http method.
60 The user code can associate these with a specific protocol per
61 vhost, and RAW-specific callbacks appear there for creation, rx,
62 writable and close. See libwebsockets-test-server-v2.0 for an example.
65 - RAW client connections are now possible using the method "RAW".
66 After connection, the socket is associated to the protocol
67 named in the client connection info and RAW-specific callbacks
68 appear there for creation, rx, writable and close.
69 See libwebsockets-test-client (with raw://) for an example.
78 - Support POST arguments, including multipart and file attachment
80 - Move most of lwsws into lws, make the stub CC0
82 - Add loopback test plugin to confirm client ws / http coexistence
84 - Integrate lwsws testing on Appveyor (ie, windows)
86 - Introduce helpers for sql, urlencode and urldecode sanitation
88 - Introduce LWS_CALLBACK_HTTP_BIND_PROTOCOL / DROP_PROTOCOL that
89 are compatible with http:/1.1 pipelining and different plugins
90 owning different parts of the URL space
92 - lwsgs - Generic Sessions plugin supports serverside sessions,
93 cookies, hashed logins, forgot password etc
95 - Added APIs for sending email to SMTP servers
97 - Messageboard example plugin for lwsgs
99 - Automatic PING sending at fixed intervals and close if no response
101 - Change default header limit in ah to 4096 (from 1024)
103 - Add SNI matching for wildcards if no specific wildcard vhost name match
105 - Convert docs to Doxygen
122 - There are only api additions, the api is compatible with v1.7.x. But
123 there is necessarily an soname bump to 8.
125 - If you are using lws client, you mainly need to be aware the option
126 LWS_SERVER_OPTION_DO_SSL_GLOBAL_INIT is needed at context-creation time
129 - If you are using lws for serving, the above is also true but there are
130 many new features to simplify your code (and life). There is a
133 https://libwebsockets.org/lws-2.0-new-features.html
135 but basically the keywords are vhosts, mounts and plugins. You can now
136 do the web serving part from lws without any user callback code at all.
137 See ./test-server/test-server-v2.0.c for an example, it has no user
138 code for ws either since it uses the protocol plugins... that one C file
139 is all that is needed to do the whole test server function.
141 You now have the option to use a small generic ws-capable webserver
142 "lwsws" and write your ws part as a plugin. That eliminates even
143 cut-and-pasting the test server code and offers more configurable
144 features like control over http cacheability in JSON.
150 These are already in 1.7.x series
152 1) MAJOR (Windows-only) fix assert firing
154 2) MAJOR http:/1.1 connections handled by lws_return_http_status() did not
155 get sent a content-length resulting in the link hanging until the peer closed
156 it. attack.sh updated to add a test for this.
158 3) MINOR An error about hdr struct in _lws_ws_related is corrected, it's not
159 known to affect anything until after it was fixed
161 4) MINOR During the close shutdown wait state introduced at v1.7, if something
162 requests callback on writeable for the socket it will busywait until the
165 5) MAJOR Although the test server has done it for a few versions already, it
166 is now required for the user code to explicitly call
168 if (lws_http_transaction_completed(wsi))
171 when it finishes replying to a transaction in http. Previously the library
172 did it for you, but that disallowed large, long transfers with multiple
173 trips around the event loop (and cgi...).
175 6) MAJOR connections on ah waiting list that closed did not get removed from
178 7) MAJOR since we added the ability to hold an ah across http keepalive
179 transactions where more headers had already arrived, we broke the ability
180 to tell if more headers had arrived. Result was if the browser didn't
181 close the keepalive, we retained ah for the lifetime of the keepalive,
184 8) MAJOR windows-only-POLLHUP was not coming
186 9) Client should not send ext hdr if no exts
191 1) MINOR test-server gained some new switches
193 -C <file> use external SSL cert file
194 -K <file> use external SSL key file
195 -A <file> use external SSL CA cert file
197 -u <uid> set effective uid
198 -g <gid> set effective gid
200 together you can use them like this to have the test-server work with the
201 usual purchased SSL certs from an official CA.
203 --ssl -C your.crt -K your.key -A your.cer -u 99 -g 99
205 2) MINOR the OpenSSL magic to setup ECDH cipher usage is implemented in the
206 library, and the ciphers restricted to use ECDH only.
207 Using this, the lws test server can score an A at SSLLABS test
209 3) MINOR STS (SSL always) header is added to the test server if you use --ssl. With
210 that, we score A+ at SSLLABS test
212 4) MINOR daemonize function (disabled at cmake by default) is updated to work
215 5) MINOR example systemd .service file now provided for test server
216 (not installed by default)
218 6) test server html is updated with tabs and a new live server monitoring
219 feature. Input sanitization added to the js.
221 7) client connections attempted when no ah is free no longer fail, they are
222 just deferred until an ah becomes available.
224 8) The test client pays attention to if you give it an http:/ or https://
225 protocol string to its argument in URL format. If so, it stays in http[s]
226 client mode and doesn't upgrade to ws[s], allowing you to do generic http client
227 operations. Receiving transfer-encoding: chunked is supported.
229 9) If you enable -DLWS_WITH_HTTP_PROXY=1 at cmake, the test server has a
230 new URI path http://localhost:7681/proxytest If you visit here, a client
231 connection to http://example.com:80 is spawned, and the results piped on
232 to your original connection.
234 10) Also with LWS_WITH_HTTP_PROXY enabled at cmake, lws wants to link to an
235 additional library, "libhubbub". This allows lws to do html rewriting on the
236 fly, adjusting proxied urls in a lightweight and fast way.
238 11) There's a new context creation flag LWS_SERVER_OPTION_DO_SSL_GLOBAL_INIT,
239 this is included automatically if you give any other SSL-related option flag.
240 If you give no SSL-related option flag, nor this one directly, then even
241 though SSL support may be compiled in, it is never initialized nor used for the
242 whole lifetime of the lws context.
244 Conversely in order to prepare the context to use SSL, even though, eg, you
245 are not listening on SSL but will use SSL client connections later, you must
246 give this flag explicitly to make sure SSL is initialized.
252 1) MINOR APIBREAK There's a new member in struct lws_context_creation_info, ecdh_curve,
253 which lets you set the name of the ECDH curve OpenSSL should use. By
254 default (if you leave ecdh_curve NULL) it will use "prime256v1"
256 2) MINOR NEWAPI It was already possible to adopt a foreign socket that had not
257 been read from using lws_adopt_socket() since v1.7. Now you can adopt a
258 partially-used socket if you don't need SSL, by passing it what you read
259 so it can drain that before reading from the socket.
261 LWS_VISIBLE LWS_EXTERN struct lws *
262 lws_adopt_socket_readbuf(struct lws_context *context, lws_sockfd_type accept_fd,
263 const char *readbuf, size_t len);
265 3) MINOR NEWAPI CGI type "network io" subprocess execution is now possible from
268 LWS_VISIBLE LWS_EXTERN int
269 lws_cgi(struct lws *wsi, char * const *exec_array, int script_uri_path_len,
272 LWS_VISIBLE LWS_EXTERN int
273 lws_cgi_kill(struct lws *wsi);
275 To use it, you must first set the cmake option
277 $ cmake .. -DLWS_WITH_CGI=1
279 See test-server-http.c and test server path
281 http://localhost:7681/cgitest
283 stdin gets http body, you can test it with wget
285 $ echo hello > hello.txt
286 $ wget http://localhost:7681/cgitest --post-file=hello.txt -O- --quiet
290 The test script returns text/html table showing /proc/meminfo. But the cgi
291 support is complete enough to run cgit cgi.
293 4) There is a helper api for forming logging timestamps
296 lwsl_timestamp(int level, char *p, int len)
298 this generates this kind of timestamp for use as logging preamble
300 lwsts[13116]: [2016/01/25 14:52:52:8386] NOTICE: Initial logging level 7
302 5) struct lws_client_connect_info has a new member
306 If it's NULL, then everything happens as before, lws_client_connect_via_info()
307 makes a ws or wss connection to the address given.
309 If you set method to a valid http method like "GET", though, then this method
310 is used and the connection remains in http[s], it's not upgraded to ws[s].
312 So with this, you can perform http[s] client operations as well as ws[s] ones.
314 There are 4 new related callbacks
316 LWS_CALLBACK_ESTABLISHED_CLIENT_HTTP = 44,
317 LWS_CALLBACK_CLOSED_CLIENT_HTTP = 45,
318 LWS_CALLBACK_RECEIVE_CLIENT_HTTP = 46,
319 LWS_CALLBACK_COMPLETED_CLIENT_HTTP = 47,
321 6) struct lws_client_connect_info has a new member
323 const char *parent_wsi
325 if non-NULL, the client wsi is set to be a child of parent_wsi. This ensures
326 if parent_wsi closes, then the client child is closed just before.
328 7) If you're using SSL, there's a new context creation-time option flag
329 LWS_SERVER_OPTION_REDIRECT_HTTP_TO_HTTPS. If you give this, non-ssl
330 connections to the server listen port are accepted and receive a 301
331 redirect to / on the same host and port using https://
333 8) User code may set per-connection extension options now, using a new api
334 "lws_set_extension_option()".
336 This should be called from the ESTABLISHED callback like this
338 lws_set_extension_option(wsi, "permessage-deflate",
339 "rx_buf_size", "12"); /* 1 << 12 */
341 If the extension is not active (missing or not negotiated for the
342 connection, or extensions are disabled on the library) the call is
343 just returns -1. Otherwise the connection's extension has its
344 named option changed.
346 The extension may decide to alter or disallow the change, in the
347 example above permessage-deflate restricts the size of his rx
348 output buffer also considering the protocol's rx_buf_size member.
351 New application lwsws
352 ---------------------
354 A libwebsockets-based general webserver is built by default now, lwsws.
356 It's configured by JSON, by default in
360 which contains global lws context settings like this
373 which contains zero or more files describing vhosts, like this
377 { "name": "warmcat.com",
379 "host-ssl-key": "/etc/pki/tls/private/warmcat.com.key",
380 "host-ssl-cert": "/etc/pki/tls/certs/warmcat.com.crt",
381 "host-ssl-ca": "/etc/pki/tls/certs/warmcat.com.cer",
384 { "home": "file:///var/www/warmcat.com" },
385 { "default": "index.html" }
401 1) There is now a "permessage-deflate" / RFC7692 implementation. It's very
402 similar to "deflate-frame" we have offered for a long while; deflate-frame is
403 now provided as an alias of permessage-deflate.
405 The main differences are that the new permessage-deflate implementation:
407 - properly performs streaming respecting input and output buffer limits. The
408 old deflate-frame implementation could only work on complete deflate input
409 and produce complete inflate output for each frame. The new implementation
410 only mallocs buffers at initialization.
412 - goes around the event loop after each input package is processed allowing
413 interleaved output processing. The RX flow control api can be used to
414 force compressed input processing to match the rate of compressed output
415 processing (test--echo shows an example of how to do this).
417 - when being "deflate-frame" for compatibility he uses the same default zlib
418 settings as the old "deflate-frame", but instead of exponentially increasing
419 malloc allocations until the whole output will fit, he observes the default
420 input and output chunking buffer sizes of "permessage-deflate", that's
421 1024 in and 1024 out at a time.
423 2) deflate-stream has been disabled for many versions (for over a year) and is
424 now removed. Browsers are now standardizing on "permessage-deflate" / RFC7692
426 3) struct lws_extension is simplified, and lws extensions now have a public
427 api (their callback) for use in user code to compose extensions and options
428 the user code wants. lws_get_internal_exts() is deprecated but kept around
429 as a NOP. The changes allow one extension implementation to go by different
430 names and allows the user client code to control option offers per-ext.
432 The test client and server are updated to use the new way. If you use
433 the old way it should still work, but extensions will be disabled until you
436 Extensions are now responsible for allocating and per-instance private struct
437 at instance construction time and freeing it when the instance is destroyed.
438 Not needing to know the size means the extension's struct can be opaque
445 1) The info struct gained three new members
447 - max_http_header_data: 0 for default (1024) or set the maximum amount of known
448 http header payload that lws can deal with. Payload in unknown http
449 headers is dropped silently. If for some reason you need to send huge
450 cookies or other HTTP-level headers, you can now increase this at context-
453 - max_http_header_pool: 0 for default (16) or set the maximum amount of http
454 headers that can be tracked by lws in this context. For the server, if
455 the header pool is completely in use then accepts on the listen socket
456 are disabled until one becomes free. For the client, if you simultaneously
457 have pending connects for more than this number of client connections,
458 additional connects will fail until some of the pending connections timeout
461 - timeout_secs: 0 for default (currently 20s), or set the library's
462 network activity timeout to the given number of seconds
464 HTTP header processing in lws only exists until just after the first main
465 callback after the HTTP handshake... for ws connections that is ESTABLISHED and
466 for HTTP connections the HTTP callback.
468 So these settings are not related to the maximum number of simultaneous
469 connections, but the number of HTTP handshakes that may be expected or ongoing,
470 or have just completed, at one time. The reason it's useful is it changes the
471 memory allocation for header processing to be one-time at context creation
472 instead of every time there is a new connection, and gives you control over
475 Setting max_http_header_pool to 1 is fine it will just queue incoming
476 connections before the accept as necessary, you can still have as many
477 simultaneous post-header connections as you like. Since the http header
478 processing is completed and the allocation released after ESTABLISHED or the
479 HTTP callback, even with a pool of 1 many connections can be handled rapidly.
481 2) There is a new callback that allows the user code to get acccess to the
482 optional close code + aux data that may have been sent by the peer.
484 LWS_CALLBACK_WS_PEER_INITIATED_CLOSE:
485 The peer has sent an unsolicited Close WS packet. @in and
486 @len are the optional close code (first 2 bytes, network
487 order) and the optional additional information which is not
488 defined in the standard, and may be a string or non-human-
490 If you return 0 lws will echo the close and then close the
491 connection. If you return nonzero lws will just close the
494 As usual not handling it does the right thing, if you're not interested in it
497 The test server has "open and close" testing buttons at the bottom, if you
498 open and close that connection, on close it will send a close code 3000 decimal
499 and the string "Bye!" as the aux data.
501 The test server dumb-increment callback handles this callback reason and prints
503 lwsts[15714]: LWS_CALLBACK_WS_PEER_INITIATED_CLOSE: len 6
504 lwsts[15714]: 0: 0x0B
505 lwsts[15714]: 1: 0xB8
506 lwsts[15714]: 2: 0x42
507 lwsts[15714]: 3: 0x79
508 lwsts[15714]: 4: 0x65
509 lwsts[15714]: 5: 0x21
511 3) There is a new API to allow the user code to control the content of the
512 close frame sent when about to return nonzero from the user callback to
513 indicate the connection should close.
516 * lws_close_reason - Set reason and aux data to send with Close packet
517 * If you are going to return nonzero from the callback
518 * requesting the connection to close, you can optionally
519 * call this to set the reason the peer will be told if
522 * @wsi: The websocket connection to set the close reason on
523 * @status: A valid close status from websocket standard
524 * @buf: NULL or buffer containing up to 124 bytes of auxiliary data
525 * @len: Length of data in @buf to send
527 LWS_VISIBLE LWS_EXTERN void
528 lws_close_reason(struct lws *wsi, enum lws_close_status status,
529 unsigned char *buf, size_t len);
531 An extra button is added to the "open and close" test server page that requests
532 that the test server close the connection from his end.
534 The test server code will do so by
536 lws_close_reason(wsi, LWS_CLOSE_STATUS_GOINGAWAY,
537 (unsigned char *)"seeya", 5);
540 The browser shows the close code and reason he received
542 websocket connection CLOSED, code: 1001, reason: seeya
544 4) There's a new context creation time option flag
546 LWS_SERVER_OPTION_VALIDATE_UTF8
548 if you set it in info->options, then TEXT and CLOSE frames will get checked to
549 confirm that they contain valid UTF-8. If they don't, the connection will get
552 5) ECDH Certs are now supported. Enable the CMake option
554 cmake .. -DLWS_SSL_SERVER_WITH_ECDH_CERT=1
556 **and** the info->options flag
558 LWS_SERVER_OPTION_SSL_ECDH
560 to build in support and select it at runtime.
562 6) There's a new api lws_parse_uri() that simplifies chopping up
563 https://xxx:yyy/zzz uris into parts nicely. The test client now uses this
564 to allow proper uris as well as the old address style.
566 7) SMP support is integrated into LWS without any internal threading. It's
567 very simple to use, libwebsockets-test-server-pthread shows how to do it,
568 use -j <n> argument there to control the number of service threads up to 32.
570 Two new members are added to the info struct
572 unsigned int count_threads;
573 unsigned int fd_limit_per_thread;
575 leave them at the default 0 to get the normal singlethreaded service loop.
577 Set count_threads to n to tell lws you will have n simultaneous service threads
578 operating on the context.
580 There is still a single listen socket on one port, no matter how many
583 When a connection is made, it is accepted by the service thread with the least
584 connections active to perform load balancing.
586 The user code is responsible for spawning n threads running the service loop
587 associated to a specific tsi (Thread Service Index, 0 .. n - 1). See
588 the libwebsockets-test-server-pthread for how to do.
590 If you leave fd_limit_per_thread at 0, then the process limit of fds is shared
591 between the service threads; if you process was allowed 1024 fds overall then
592 each thread is limited to 1024 / n.
594 You can set fd_limit_per_thread to a nonzero number to control this manually, eg
595 the overall supported fd limit is less than the process allowance.
597 You can control the context basic data allocation for multithreading from Cmake
598 using -DLWS_MAX_SMP=, if not given it's set to 32. The serv_buf allocation
599 for the threads (currently 4096) is made at runtime only for active threads.
601 Because lws will limit the requested number of actual threads supported
602 according to LWS_MAX_SMP, there is an api lws_get_count_threads(context) to
603 discover how many threads were actually allowed when the context was created.
605 It's required to implement locking in the user code in the same way that
606 libwebsockets-test-server-pthread does it, for the FD locking callbacks.
608 If LWS_MAX_SMP=1, then there is no code related to pthreads compiled in the
609 library. If more than 1, a small amount of pthread mutex code is built into
614 LWS_VISIBLE struct lws *
615 lws_adopt_socket(struct lws_context *context, lws_sockfd_type accept_fd)
617 allows foreign sockets accepted by non-lws code to be adopted by lws as if they
618 had just been accepted by lws' own listen socket.
620 9) X-Real-IP: header has been added as WSI_TOKEN_HTTP_X_REAL_IP
622 10) Libuv support is added, there are new related user apis
624 typedef void (lws_uv_signal_cb_t)(uv_loop_t *l, uv_signal_t *w, int revents);
626 LWS_VISIBLE LWS_EXTERN int
627 lws_uv_sigint_cfg(struct lws_context *context, int use_uv_sigint,
628 lws_uv_signal_cb_t *cb);
630 LWS_VISIBLE LWS_EXTERN int
631 lws_uv_initloop(struct lws_context *context, uv_loop_t *loop, int tsi);
634 lws_uv_sigint_cb(uv_loop_t *loop, uv_signal_t *watcher, int revents);
644 1) LWS_SEND_BUFFER_POST_PADDING is now 0 and deprecated. You can remove it; if
645 you still use it, obviously it does nothing. Old binary code with nonzero
646 LWS_SEND_BUFFER_POST_PADDING is perfectly compatible, the old code just
647 allocated a buffer bigger than the library is going to use.
649 The example apps no longer use LWS_SEND_BUFFER_POST_PADDING.
651 The only path who made use of it was sending with LWS_WRITE_CLOSE --->
653 2) Because of lws_close_reason() formalizing handling close frames,
654 LWS_WRITE_CLOSE is removed from libwebsockets.h. It was only of use to send
655 close frames...close frame content should be managed using lws_close_reason()
658 3) We check for invalid CLOSE codes and complain about protocol violation in
659 our close code. But it changes little since we were in the middle of closing
662 4) zero-length RX frames and zero length TX frames are now allowed.
664 5) Pings and close used to be limited to 124 bytes, the correct limit is 125
665 so that is now also allowed.
667 6) LWS_PRE is provided as a synonym for LWS_SEND_BUFFER_PRE_PADDING, either is
670 7) There's generic support for RFC7462 style extension options built into the
671 library now. As a consequence, a field "options" is added to lws_extension.
672 It can be NULL if there are no options on the extension. Extension internal
673 info is part of the public abi because extensions may be implemented outside
676 8) WSI_TOKEN_PROXY enum was accidentally defined to collide with another token
677 of value 73. That's now corrected and WSI_TOKEN_PROXY moved to his own place at
680 9) With the addition of libuv support, libev is not the only event loop
681 library in town and his api names must be elaborated with _ev_
683 Callback typedef: lws_signal_cb ---> lws_ev_signal_cb_t
684 lws_sigint_cfg --> lws_ev_sigint_cfg
685 lws_initloop --> lws_ev_initloop
686 lws_sigint_cb --> lws_ev_sigint_cb
688 10) Libev support is made compatible with multithreaded service,
689 lws_ev_initloop (was lws_initloop) gets an extra argument for the
690 thread service index (use 0 if you will just have 1 service thread).
692 LWS_VISIBLE LWS_EXTERN int
693 lws_ev_initloop(struct lws_context *context, ev_loop_t *loop, int tsi);
696 (for earlier changelogs, see the tagged releases)