Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

HTTP::Daemon

The HTTP::Daemon module creates HTTP server applications. The module provides objects based on the IO::Socket::INET class that can listen on a socket for client requests and send server responses. The objects implemented by the module are HTTP 1.1 servers. Client requests are stored as HTTP::Request objects, and all the methods for that class can be used to obtain information about the request. HTTP::Response objects can be used to send information back to the client.

An HTTP::Daemon object is created by using the new constructor. Since the base class for this object is IO::Socket::INET, the parameters used in that class’s constructor are the same here. For example:

$d = HTTP::Daemon->new ( LocalAddr => 'maude.oreilly.com',
                         LocalPort => 8888,
                         Listen => 5 );

The HTTP::Daemon object is a server socket that automatically listens for requests on the specified port (or on the default port if none is given). When a client request is received, the object uses the accept method to create a connection with the client on the network.

$d = HTTP::Daemon->new;
while ( $c = $d->accept ) {
     $req = $c->get_request;
     # Process request and send response here
     }
$c = undef;   # Don't forget to close the socket

The accept method returns a reference to a new object of the HTTP::Daemon::ClientConn class. This class is also based on IO::Socket::INET and is used to extract the request message and send the response and any requested file content.

The sockets created by both HTTP::Daemon and HTTP::Daemon::ClientConn ...