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wasmtime serve ignoring scheme in absolute-form requests #11571

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Description

@sepointon

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Test Case

https://gitlab.com/sampointon/wasmtime-url-print

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Check out the above repository.
  2. cargo build --target wasm32-wasip2
  3. wasmtime serve target/wasm32-wasip2/debug/wasmtime-url-print.wasm -S cli=y
  4. In a new terminal, manually send a HTTP/1.1 request with a scheme that's not http e.g. via netcat - example log (note the request line is in absolute-form):
$ nc localhost 8080
GET https://foo.example/bar HTTP/1.1
Host: baz.example

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
content-type: text/plain
content-length: 22
date: Fri, 29 Aug 2025 17:48:48 GMT

http://foo.example/bar

Expected Results

The https scheme in the request would be preserved.

Actual Results

The scheme was forcibly set to http.

(I do note, happily, that it's doing the right thing and ignoring Host in this instance, so it's not all bad.)

Versions and Environment

Wasmtime version or commit: 36.0.2

Operating system: Fedora 42

Architecture: x86_64

Extra Info

RFC 9112, section 3.3, 'Reconstructing the Target URI`:

The target URI is the request-target when the request-target is in absolute-form. In that case, a server will parse the URI into its generic components for further evaluation.

The current behaviour is entirely explained by line 742 in serve.rs, which is hard-coding the scheme to http.

I see that there's already been some back and forth on this in #8923 and #8878, but the present behaviour is simply wrong according to the spec.

wasmtime should probably defer to the scheme provided by hyper (which I've verified is correct in this case) on the basis that hyper sees the actual request line and can follow the guidance in RFC 9112 section 3.3 depending on whether it's in absolute-form or origin-form. Keeping around a scheme and authority and a request::Parts struct that has its own scheme and authority in HostIncomingRequest seems weird and likely to be a bug magnet.

In practice, most requests in the wild will be origin-form, but I'm getting annoyingly snagged on this because I'm trying to do some local testing of some code that's unhappy if the request URLs aren't as it expects them to be, and I'd like to avoid having to spin up any infrastructure (e.g., DNS, certs, reverse proxies...) for that purpose. This sort of use-case (local testing of wasi-http components in a non-prod environment) seems to be squarely in the domain of wasmtime serve, so it would be useful if it was easy to 'fake' input URLs by using absolute-form requests.

Activity

  1. added
    bugIncorrect behavior in the current implementation that needs fixing
    on Aug 29, 2025
  2. sepointon commented on Aug 30, 2025

    @sepointon
    Author

    I had a look at making a PR, but I think that there are some decisions to be made first in wasi-http about what exactly is expected of implementations wrt request control data and faithfully reflecting incoming requests vs being convenient (WebAssembly/WASI#788).

  3. alexcrichton commented on Sep 2, 2025

    @alexcrichton
    Member

    Thanks for the report! A PR would indeed be quite welcome, and no worries if it requires some spec clarifications first. Thanks for opening the upstream issue!

  4. self-assigned this
    on Sep 2, 2025
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