kcup

kcup is a single file server. It responds to every GET request it receives with the content of a given file (specified by ENV, CLI argument or STDIN), and for every other request (with any other HTTP method or path) it returns a 404.

kcup was invented to help with cases where a generally small file needs to be delivered at a certain path, for example MTA STS's /.well-known/mta-sts.txt. You can read more about this on the associated blog post.

BEWARE This project and repo is so simple that there aren't even any tests -- I may add some in the future after light use. The machinery (Makefile targets, CI integration, etc) is there for unit, integration and e2e tests, but there just are none. Despite there being no tests, it does "just work" has been benchmarked. Use at your own risk.

See also kcup-go

Quickstart

kcup only needs the path to a single file to run:

$ kcup -f <file path>

By default, kcup will serve the file at host 127.0.0.1 on port 5000. kcup can also take file content from STDIN like so:

$ kcup <<EOF
> your file content
> goes here
> EOF

Usage

kcup 0.1.0

USAGE:
    kcup [OPTIONS]

FLAGS:
        --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -f, --file <FILE>                                                File to read [env: FILE=]
    -h, --host <host>                                                Host [env: HOST=]  [default: 127.0.0.1]
    -p, --port <port>                                                Port [env: PORT=]  [default: 5000]
        --stdin-read-timeout-seconds <stdin-read-timeout-seconds>
            Amount of seconds to wait for input on STDIN to serve [env: STDIN_READ_TIMEOUT_SECONDS=]  [default: 60]

Environment Variables

Useful Makefile targets

The following targets are mostly useful for development, testing the current build, as most depend on cargo run.

Running the current build of kcup with HEREDOCs

$ make run <<EOF
>
> You enter some text
> EOF
cargo run
    Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.04s
     Running `target/debug/kcup`
[2021-05-09T02:51:58Z INFO  kcup] Server configured to run @ [127.0.0.1:5000]
[2021-05-09T02:51:58Z INFO  kcup] No file path provided, waiting for input on STDIN (max 60 seconds)...
[2021-05-09T02:51:58Z INFO  kcup] Successfully read input from STDIN
[2021-05-09T02:51:58Z INFO  kcup] Read [16] characters
[2021-05-09T02:51:58Z INFO  kcup] Starting HTTP server...

Serve the example file in the repository

$ make example

You can serve the example file in the repository with TLS as well

$ make example-tls

Note that the example page is NOT included in the kcup binary, you have to bring your own file to serve at production time.

FAQ

Why is this project named "kcup"?

Keurig created a "K-Cup" brewing system that has become somewhat infamous.

Alternatives

miniserve

tl;dr kcup is about 2x faster than miniserve, which is expected as it does much less.

miniserve is a project that aims to serve files and directories over HTTP that was suggested on reddit by /u/vlmutolo. Since miniserve is also capable of serving a single file I've tested it gainst kcup with the usual wrk command and here are the results tabulated. Roughly by running the following:

$ kcup -f /tmp/testfiles/file-1M &
$ miniserve /tmp/testfiles/file-1M -p 5001 &
$ wrk -t12 -c400 -d30s --latency https://127.0.0.1:5000/any/path/will/work # a few times
$ wrk -t12 -c400 -d30s --latency https://127.0.0.1:5001 # a few times

As you might expect, kcup does so little (though there are some feature differences in the overlap) that it performs roughly 2x as well as miniserve.

I did not limit the processes and my machine is pretty beefy: 6 physical cores (12 hyper threads) and 32GB of RAM so these processes got as much room as they cared to use.