lws can now work well on the ESP8266.
You should get the ESP8266 Espressif SDK-based project here
https://github.com/lws-team/esplws
which includes lws as an “app” in the build. The project provides full AP-based setup over the web, and once the device has been configured to associate to a local AP, a separate station vhost with the lws test protocols.
Instructions for building that are here
https://github.com/lws-team/esplws/blob/master/README.md
There are also instructions there for how to remove the test apps from the build and customize your own station content.
The following existing lws features are used to make a nice integration:
vhosts: there are separate vhosts for the configuration AP mode and the normal station mode.
file_ops: the lws file operations are overridden and handled by a ROMFS parser
mounts: mounts are used to serve files automatically from the ROMFS
plugins: standalone protocol plugins are included into the build, so there are clean individual implementations for each protocol, while everything is statically linked
lws stability and security features like bytewise parsers, sophisticated timeouts, http/1.1 keepalive support