GCDWebServer

What is GCDWebServer?

GCDWebServer is a modern and lightweight GCD based HTTP 1.1 server designed to be embedded in iOS, macOS & tvOS apps. It was written from scratch with the following goals in mind:

• Elegant and easy to use architecture with only 4 core classes: server, connection, request and response (see “Understanding GCDWebServer’s Architecture” below)
• Well designed API with fully documented headers for easy integration and customization
• Entirely built with an event-driven design using Grand Central Dispatch for best performance and concurrency
• No dependencies on third-party source code
• Available under a friendly New BSD License

Extra built-in features:

• Allow implementation of fully asynchronous handlers of incoming HTTP requests
• Minimize memory usage with disk streaming of large HTTP request or response bodies
• Parser for web forms submitted using “application/x-www-form-urlencoded” or “multipart/form-data” encodings (including file uploads)
• JSON parsing and serialization for request and response HTTP bodies
• Chunked transfer encoding for request and response HTTP bodies
• HTTP compression with gzip for request and response HTTP bodies
• HTTP range support for requests of local files
• Basic and Digest Access authentications for password protection
• Automatically handle transitions between foreground, background and suspended modes in iOS apps
• Full support for both IPv4 and IPv6
• NAT port mapping (IPv4 only)

Included extensions:

• GCDWebUploader: subclass of GCDWebServer that implements an interface for uploading and downloading files using a web browser
• GCDWebDAVServer: subclass of GCDWebServer that implements a class 1 WebDAV server (with partial class 2 support for macOS Finder)

What’s not supported (but not really required from an embedded HTTP server):

• Keep-alive connections
• HTTPS

Overview