hpack-gem

A Ruby native extension (C gem) that wraps the mk-hpack C library, exposing HPACK and Huffman encoding/decoding to Ruby.

API

The extension defines a single HPACK module with four singleton methods:

• HPACK.encode(string) — HPACK-encode a string
• HPACK.decode(string) — HPACK-decode a string
• HPACK.huffman_encode(string) — Huffman-encode a string
• HPACK.huffman_decode(string) — Huffman-decode a string

All methods accept and return binary strings. On error, a RuntimeError is raised with the underlying C error code.

Prerequisites

The mk-hpack submodule must be initialised before building. From the repository root:

git submodule update --init mk-hpack

The mk-hpack/ directory inside hpack-gem/ expects a pre-built hpack.h header and libhpack.a static library from the submodule.

You will also need a working Ruby development environment (with mkmf/ruby.h).

Building

cd hpack-gem
ruby extconf.rb
make

This produces hpack.so (or equivalent shared library for your platform).

Testing

A manual test script is included:

ruby test/test.rb

The test encodes and decodes several sample strings (e.g. www.example.com, /sample/path) and verifies round-trip correctness for both Huffman and HPACK operations.

Files

File	Purpose
extconf.rb	mkmf build script; locates hpack.h and libhpack.a
hpack.c	C extension source; bridges mk-hpack functions to Ruby
mk-hpack/	Expected location of the built mk-hpack library
test/test.rb	Manual round-trip test script