Webrick

WEBrick is an HTTP server toolkit that can be configured as an HTTPS server, a proxy server, and a virtual-host server.

WEBrick features complete logging of both server operations and HTTP access.

WEBrick supports both basic and digest authentication in addition to algorithms not in RFC 2617.

A WEBrick server can be composed of multiple WEBrick servers or servlets to provide differing behavior on a per-host or per-path basis. WEBrick includes servlets for handling CGI scripts, ERB pages, Ruby blocks and directory listings.

WEBrick also includes tools for daemonizing a process and starting a process at a higher privilege level and dropping permissions.

WEBrick is suitable for use in testing and for development. However, while the developers of WEBrick will attempt to fix security issues, they do not encourage the use of WEBrick to serve production web applications that may be subject to hostile input.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'webrick'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install webrick

Usage

To create a new WEBrick::HTTPServer that will listen to connections on port 8000 and serve documents from the current user's public_html folder:

require 'webrick'

root = File.expand_path '~/public_html'
server = WEBrick::HTTPServer.new :Port => 8000, :DocumentRoot => root

To run the server you will need to provide a suitable shutdown hook as starting the server blocks the current thread:

trap 'INT' do server.shutdown end

server.start

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/ruby/webrick.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the 2-Clause BSD License.