Anatomy of a Request

Lesson 20 of 47 in Coddy's Networking with the Terminal course.

Underneath curl, an HTTP request is plain text sent over a socket. It starts with one line naming what you want:

GET /index.html HTTP/1.1

Three parts: the method (what kind of operation), the path (which thing), and the version. After that come headers, one per line, then a blank line, then an optional body.

The blank line is not decoration. It is how the server knows the headers have ended and the body, if any, begins. A request without it hangs, because the server is still waiting to hear the rest.

You can send one by hand. nc opens a raw connection and whatever you feed it goes straight down the wire:

printf 'GET / HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n' | nc 127.0.0.1 9110

\r\n is the line ending HTTP requires, and the doubled one is that blank line.

Challenge

Hard

Skip curl entirely and speak HTTP yourself.

Create index.html containing raw
Serve the folder on port 9110
Send a raw GET /index.html HTTP/1.0 request through nc and print only the first line of what comes back

That first line is the server's status line. Expected output: