quiche is an implementation of the QUIC transport protocol and HTTP/3 as specified by the IETF. It provides a low level API for processing QUIC packets and handling connection state. The application is responsible for providing I/O (e.g. sockets handling) as well as an event loop with support for timers.
A live QUIC server based on quiche is available at https://quic.tech:4433/
to be used for experimentation.
For more information on how quiche came about and some insights into its design you can read a post on Cloudflare's (where this library is used in production) blog that goes into some more detail.
Getting Started
Connection setup
The first step in establishing a QUIC connection using quiche is creating a configuration object:
let config = new?;
This is shared among multiple connections and can be used to configure a QUIC endpoint.
On the client-side the connect()
utility function can be used to create
a new connection, while accept()
is for servers:
// Client connection.
let conn = connect?;
// Server connection.
let conn = accept?;
Handling incoming packets
Using the connection's recv()
method the application can process
incoming packets that belong to that connection from the network:
loop
Generating outgoing packets
Outgoing packet are generated using the connection's send()
method
instead:
loop
When packets are sent, the application is responsible for maintaining a
timer to react to time-based connection events. The timer expiration can be
obtained using the connection's timeout()
method.
let timeout = conn.timeout;
The application is responsible for providing a timer implementation, which
can be specific to the operating system or networking framework used. When
a timer expires, the connection's on_timeout()
method should be called,
after which additional packets might need to be sent on the network:
// Timeout expired, handle it.
conn.on_timeout;
// Send more packets as needed after timeout.
loop
Sending and receiving stream data
After some back and forth, the connection will complete its handshake and will be ready for sending or receiving application data.
Data can be sent on a stream by using the stream_send()
method:
if conn.is_established
The application can check whether there are any readable streams by using
the connection's readable()
method, which returns an iterator over all
the streams that have outstanding data to read.
The stream_recv()
method can then be used to retrieve the application
data from the readable stream:
if conn.is_established
HTTP/3
The quiche HTTP/3 module provides a high level API for sending and receiving HTTP requests and responses on top of the QUIC transport protocol.
Have a look at the examples/ directory for more complete examples on how to use the quiche API, including examples on how to use quiche in C/C++ applications (see below for more information).
Calling quiche from C/C++
quiche exposes a thin C API on top of the Rust API that can be used to more easily integrate quiche into C/C++ applications (as well as in other languages that allow calling C APIs via some form of FFI). The C API follows the same design of the Rust one, modulo the constraints imposed by the C language itself.
When running cargo build
, a static library called libquiche.a
will be
built automatically alongside the Rust one. This is fully stand-alone and can
be linked directly into C/C++ applications.
Building
quiche requires Rust 1.35 or later to build. The latest stable Rust release can be installed using rustup.
Once the Rust build environment is setup, the quiche source code can be fetched using git:
and then built using cargo:
cargo can also be used to run the testsuite:
Note that BoringSSL, which is used to implement QUIC's cryptographic handshake
based on TLS, needs to be built and linked to quiche. This is done automatically
when building quiche using cargo, but requires the cmake
and go
commands to
be available during the build process.
In alternative you can use your own custom build of BoringSSL by configuring
the BoringSSL directory with the QUICHE_BSSL_PATH
environment variable:
Building for Android
To build quiche for Android, you need the following:
- Install Android NDK (13b or higher), using Android Studio or directly.
- Set
ANDROID_NDK_HOME
environment variable to NDK path, e.g. using bash:
- Install the Rust toolchain for Android architectures:
Then, to prepare the cross-compiling toolchain, run the following command:
It will create a standalone toolchain for arm64/arm/x86 architectures under the
$TOOLCHAIN_DIR/arch
directory. If you didn't set TOOLCHAIN_DIR
environment
variable, the current directory will be used. Note that the minimum API level is
21 for all target architectures.
After it run successfully, run the following script to build libquiche:
It will build binaries for aarch64, armv7 and i686. You can pass parameters to this script for cargo build. For example if you want to build a release binary with verbose logs, do the following:
Building for iOS
To build quiche for iOS, you need the following:
- Install Xcode command-line tools. You can install them with Xcode or with the following command:
- Install the Rust toolchain for iOS architectures:
- Install
cargo-lipo
:
To build libquiche, run the following command:
or
Copyright
Copyright (C) 2018, Cloudflare, Inc.
Copyright (C) 2018, Alessandro Ghedini
See COPYING for the license.