How do I use a browser as a client in python sockets? - python

I tried to search in the internet for this subject, But I didn't found some answers.
If some know how can I use a browser as a client in python sockets it will be very good.

To use the browser as a client to a python (server) socket, you simply need to point it to the right endpoint.
Assuming you are running the browser and the python server on the same machine, and that you're opening port 1234 on the server socket, you simply need to open the localhost:1234 URL in your browser.
Of course, what happens next is entirely dependent on how you handle the communication in your program. Most browsers will understand plain text put directly on the socket, but you probably want to talk HTTP.
It's worth mentioning that using a plain socket to communicate with a browser is, at best, uncommon. There may be better solutions, depending on what, exactly, you want to do:
If you just want to quickly serve a few files from a directory (i.e.: often
called a "directory listing"), you can use SimpleHTTPServer
If you're trying to build a website, you should look into a web framework, such as Django, Flask or CherryPy
If you want a lower-level highly asynchronous scalable communication, Tornado is a popular choice

You might want to consider using websockets. They essentially function like regular TCP sockets, but are initiated with a HTTP handshake, making them suitable for browsers. They are supported in recent versions of all major browsers. There are many libraries available that adapt common python webservers to serve websockets as well, for example:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/gevent-websocket/
if you like gevent.
They also support an SSL layer, which is called using a url starting with "wss://" on the browser side. More information here:
https://www.websocket.org/

Related

High level Python library for using Websocket and Comet "fallback" transparently

I'm looking for a High Level Python library for establishing HTTP connections to a Web server.
The connections should ideally remain open (persistant) for sending and receiving two-ways messages, so Websocket are great to me.
As I want it to be compatible will most HTTP proxies, I think about a "fallback" mode with HTTP polling (Comet style).
My problem is I can't find a library for managing these two kinds of connections transparently. Ideally, I would establish the connection to the server with one of the techniques (Websocket or Comet), then simply send/receive messages using the same functions for both types of connections.
I found many Python servers and some Js clients for that purpose, but not in Python.
I looked at : Twisted, Tornado, ZeroMQ, py4ws
Have you taken a look at socket.io? It mainly works with websockets but has plenty of fallbacks and is thus supposed to be supported by all browsers.
For the server side, I've used flask together with gevent-socketio. Miquel Gringberg has recently released flask-socketio extension which is a nice abstraction for working with flask and gevent-socketio. Gevent-socketio is built on the nice gevent library.
gevent-socketio should work fine with other Python frameworks, such as Django and Bottle.
I'm not entirely sure if this fits your bill but probably worth a look.
I think Python Socket-IO client could be a good solution :
https://github.com/invisibleroads/socketIO-client
He can interact easily with a Socket.io NodeJs server, with same paradigms.
I tested it and it can default with Websocket connection and fallbacks to xhr-polling, which is great (I actually tested this features through a proxy).
Example :
with SocketIO('http://127.0.0.1', 7777, Namespace, transports=["websocket", "xhr-polling"], proxies={'http': 'http://localhost:8888'}) as socketIO:
socketIO.on('foo',some_callback_function)
socketIO.emit('bar')
socketIO.wait()

Possible to use websockets on a shared hosting web server?

I use PHP, JS, HTML, CSS. I'm willing to learn ruby or python if that is the best option.
My next project will involve live data being fed to users from the server and vice versa. I have shell access on my shared server, but I'm not sure about access to ports. Is it possible to use websockets or any other efficient server-client connection on a shared hosting account, and if so, what do I need to do?
For having the best performance and full control of your setup you need "your own" server.
Today there are a huge amount of virtual server providers which means you get full control over your IP but where the physical server is still shared between many clients, meaning cheaper prices and more flexibility.
I recommend utilizing the free tier program at Amazon EC2, you can always resign after the free period. And they have many geographical locations to choose from.
Another provider in Europe that I have been satisfied with is Tilaa
You can probably find many more alternatives that suits your needs on the Webhosting talk forum
Until some weeks ago, websockets deployment required either a standalone server running on a different port, or server side proxies like varnish/haproxy to listen on port 80 and redirecting normal http traffic. The latest nginx versions added built-in support for websockets, but unless your hosting provider uses it, you're out of luck. (note that I don't have personal experience with this nginx feature)
Personally I find that for most applications, websockets can be replaced with Server-sent events instead - a very lightweight protocol which is basically another http connection that stays open on the server side and sends a stream of plaintext with messages separated by double newlines.
It's supported in most decent browsers, but since this excludes internet explorer there are polyfills available here and here
This covers one side of the connection, the one that is usually implemented with long-polling. The other direction can be covered the usual way with XHR. The end result is very similar to websockets IMO, but with a bit higher latency for client->server messages.

Which ports will python use to send html request? with urllib or urllib2

I'm using webpy to make a small site. When I want to use OAuth, i find that the firewall will stop the http request to any site, I even can't use IE to browse the Internet.
So i asked the aministrator to open some ports for me, but i don't know which ports will be used by python or IE to send http request.
Thanks!
I assume you're talking about the remote ports. In that case, just tell the admin to open the standard web ports. Really, if your admin doesn't know how to make IE work through the firewall, he's hopeless. I suggest walking up to random people on the street and say "80 and 443" until someone looks up, then fire your admin and hire that guy; he can't be any worse.
If your admin does know what he's doing, and wants you to use an HTTP proxy instead of connecting directly, ask him to set up the proxy for you in IE, look at the settings he uses, then come back here and search for how to use HTTP proxies in Python (there are lots of answers on that), and ask for help if you get stuck.
If you're talking about the local ports, because you're got an insane firewall, they'll be picked at random from some large range. If you want to cover every common OS, you need all of 1024-65535 to be opened up, although if you only need to deal with a single platform, most use a smaller range than that, and if the machine won't be doing much but running your program, most have a way to restrict it to an even smaller range (e.g., as small as 255 ports on Windows). Google "ephemeral port" for details.
If you need to restrict your local port, the key is to call bind on your socket before calling connect. If you think you're talking about the local ports, you're probably wrong. Go ask your admin (or the new one you just hired) and make sure. But if you are…
If you're using urllib/urllib2, it does not have any way to do what you want, so you can't do that anymore. You can drop down to httplib, which lets you pass a source_address, a (host, port) tuple that it will use to bind the socket before connecting. It's not as simple as what you're using, but it's a lot easier than implementing HTTP from scratch.
You might also want to look at requests, which I know has its own native OAuth support, and probably has a way to specify a source address. (I haven't looked, but I usually find that whenever I want to know if requests can do X, it can, and in the most obvious way I think of…) The API for requests is generally similar to urllib2 when urllib2 is sane, simpler and cleaner when urllib2 is messy, so it's usually pretty easy to port things.
At any rate, however you do this, you will have to consider the fact that only one socket can be bound to the same local port at a time. So, what happens if two programs are running at once, and they both need to make an outbound connections, and your admin has only given you one port? One of them will fail. Is that acceptable?
If not, what you really need to do is open a range of ports, and write code that does a random.shuffle on the range, then tries to bind them until one succeeds. Which means you'll need an HTTP library that lets you feed in a socket factory or a pre-opened socket instead of just specifying a port, which most of them do not, which probably means you'll be hacking up a copy of the httplib source.
If all else fails, you can always set up a local proxy that binds to whatever source port (or port range) you want when proxying outward. Then you can just use your favorite high-level library, as-is, and connect to the local proxy, and there's no way the firewall can tell what's going on behind the proxy.
As you can see, this is not easy. That's mainly because you very actually rarely this.
Generally when a program wants to use a port but doesn't care which number it has, it uses an "ephemeral port." This is typical for client applications, where the remote port is fixed (by the server), but the local port doesn't make any difference.
Often a firewall will allow outgoing connections from any port, simply blocking incoming connections to unknown ports, on the theory that internal machines making outgoing requests should be allowed to decide what is proper, and that bad actors are all on the "public" side.
You may find that your administrator requires you to use an "HTTP proxy." If so, here are the instructions for Ruby which I imagine you can port to Python: Ruby and Rails - oauth and http proxy

Implement a Web based Client that interacts with a TCP Server

EDIT:Question Updated. Thanks Slott.
I have a TCP Server in Python.
It is a server with asynchronous behaviour. .
The message format is Binary Data.
Currently I have a python client that interacts with the code.
What I want to be able to do eventually implement a Web based Front End to this client.
I just wanted to know , what should be correct design for such an application.
Start with any WSGI-based web server. werkzeug is a choice.
The Asynchronous TCP/IP is a seriously complicated problem. HTTP is synchronous. So using the synchronous web server presenting some asynchronous data is always a problem. Always.
The best you can do is to buffer things and have two processes in your web application.
TCP/IP process that collects data from the remove server and buffers it in a file (or files) somewhere.
WSGI web process which handles GET/POST processing.
GET requests will fetch some or all of the buffer and display it.
POST requests will send a message to the TCP/IP server.
For Web-based, talk HTTP. Use JSON or XML as data formats.
Be standards-compliant and make use of the vast number of libraries out there. Don't reinvent the wheel. This way you have less headaches in the long run.
if you need to maintain a connection to a backend server across multiple HTTP requests, Twisted's HTTP server is an ideal choice, since it's built to manage multiple connections easily.

How to write a server using existing version and wireshark?

I decided to improve my knowledge about python network programming and here is the deal: I have a simple server for Windows, which interacts with a client from a mobile device using wi-fi. Also I have a packet sniffer (Wireshark).
Now I want to ask, what do I need to write the Linux version of this server? How to determine the structure of packets, establish the connection? What do I need to use - sockets, Twisted, maybe Tornado?
Start with the SocketServer module and build from there.
Note that this will take a lot of guesswork if there is no documentation about the protocol. If you're lucky, they are using XML or HTML. If not, you will have to make the existing server send a lot of test data which you have to manipulate in some way (by changing fields and see what changes in the data stream).
Good luck!

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