This module provides access to the BSD socket interface. It is available on all modern Unix systems, Windows, MacOS, OS/2, and probably additional platforms.
Note
Some behavior may be platform dependent, since calls are made to the operating system socket APIs.
For an introduction to socket programming (in C), see the following papers: An Introductory 4.3BSD Interprocess Communication Tutorial, by Stuart Sechrest and An Advanced 4.3BSD Interprocess Communication Tutorial, by Samuel J. Leffler et al, both in the UNIX Programmer’s Manual, Supplementary Documents 1 (sections PS1:7 and PS1:8). The platform-specific reference material for the various socket-related system calls are also a valuable source of information on the details of socket semantics. For Unix, refer to the manual pages; for Windows, see the WinSock (or Winsock 2) specification. For IPv6-ready APIs, readers may want to refer to RFC 3493 titled Basic Socket Interface Extensions for IPv6.
The Python interface is a straightforward transliteration of the Unix system call and library interface for sockets to Python’s object-oriented style: the socket() function returns a socket object whose methods implement the various socket system calls. Parameter types are somewhat higher-level than in the C interface: as with read() and write() operations on Python files, buffer allocation on receive operations is automatic, and buffer length is implicit on send operations.
Socket addresses are represented as follows: A single string is used for the AF_UNIX address family. A pair (host, port) is used for the AF_INET address family, where host is a string representing either a hostname in Internet domain notation like 'daring.cwi.nl' or an IPv4 address like '100.50.200.5', and port is an integral port number. For AF_INET6 address family, a four-tuple (host, port, flowinfo, scopeid) is used, where flowinfo and scopeid represents sin6_flowinfo and sin6_scope_id member in struct sockaddr_in6 in C. For socket module methods, flowinfo and scopeid can be omitted just for backward compatibility. Note, however, omission of scopeid can cause problems in manipulating scoped IPv6 addresses. Other address families are currently not supported. The address format required by a particular socket object is automatically selected based on the address family specified when the socket object was created.
For IPv4 addresses, two special forms are accepted instead of a host address: the empty string represents INADDR_ANY, and the string '<broadcast>' represents INADDR_BROADCAST. The behavior is not available for IPv6 for backward compatibility, therefore, you may want to avoid these if you intend to support IPv6 with your Python programs.
If you use a hostname in the host portion of IPv4/v6 socket address, the program may show a nondeterministic behavior, as Python uses the first address returned from the DNS resolution. The socket address will be resolved differently into an actual IPv4/v6 address, depending on the results from DNS resolution and/or the host configuration. For deterministic behavior use a numeric address in host portion.
AF_NETLINK sockets are represented as pairs pid, groups.
Linux-only support for TIPC is also available using the AF_TIPC address family. TIPC is an open, non-IP based networked protocol designed for use in clustered computer environments. Addresses are represented by a tuple, and the fields depend on the address type. The general tuple form is (addr_type, v1, v2, v3 [, scope]), where:
addr_type is one of TIPC_ADDR_NAMESEQ, TIPC_ADDR_NAME, or TIPC_ADDR_ID.
scope is one of TIPC_ZONE_SCOPE, TIPC_CLUSTER_SCOPE, and TIPC_NODE_SCOPE.
If addr_type is TIPC_ADDR_NAME, then v1 is the server type, v2 is the port identifier, and v3 should be 0.
If addr_type is TIPC_ADDR_NAMESEQ, then v1 is the server type, v2 is the lower port number, and v3 is the upper port number.
If addr_type is TIPC_ADDR_ID, then v1 is the node, v2 is the reference, and v3 should be set to 0.
If addr_type is TIPC_ADDR_ID, then v1 is the node, v2 is the reference, and v3 should be set to 0.
All errors raise exceptions. The normal exceptions for invalid argument types and out-of-memory conditions can be raised; errors related to socket or address semantics raise the error socket.error.
Non-blocking mode is supported through setblocking(). A generalization of this based on timeouts is supported through settimeout().
The module socket exports the following constants and functions:
This exception is raised for socket-related errors. The accompanying value is either a string telling what went wrong or a pair (errno, string) representing an error returned by a system call, similar to the value accompanying os.error. See the module errno, which contains names for the error codes defined by the underlying operating system.
This exception is raised for address-related errors, i.e. for functions that use h_errno in the C API, including gethostbyname_ex() and gethostbyaddr().
The accompanying value is a pair (h_errno, string) representing an error returned by a library call. string represents the description of h_errno, as returned by the hstrerror() C function.
Translate the host/port argument into a sequence of 5-tuples that contain all the necessary arguments for creating a socket connected to that service. host is a domain name, a string representation of an IPv4/v6 address or None. port is a string service name such as 'http', a numeric port number or None. By passing None as the value of host and port, you can pass NULL to the underlying C API.
The family, socktype and proto arguments can be optionally specified in order to narrow the list of addresses returned. Passing zero as a value for each of these arguments selects the full range of results. The flags argument can be one or several of the AI_* constants, and will influence how results are computed and returned. For example, AI_NUMERICHOST will disable domain name resolution and will raise an error if host is a domain name.
The function returns a list of 5-tuples with the following structure:
(family, socktype, proto, canonname, sockaddr)
In these tuples, family, socktype, proto are all integers and are meant to be passed to the socket() function. canonname will be a string representing the canonical name of the host if AI_CANONNAME is part of the flags argument; else canonname will be empty. sockaddr is a tuple describing a socket address, whose format depends on the returned family (a (address, port) 2-tuple for AF_INET, a (address, port, flow info, scope id) 4-tuple for AF_INET6), and is meant to be passed to the socket.connect() method.
The following example fetches address information for a hypothetical TCP connection to www.python.org on port 80 (results may differ on your system if IPv6 isn’t enabled):
>>> socket.getaddrinfo("www.python.org", 80, 0, 0, socket.SOL_TCP)
[(2, 1, 6, '', ('82.94.164.162', 80)),
(10, 1, 6, '', ('2001:888:2000:d::a2', 80, 0, 0))]
Return a string containing the hostname of the machine where the Python interpreter is currently executing.
If you want to know the current machine’s IP address, you may want to use gethostbyname(gethostname()). This operation assumes that there is a valid address-to-host mapping for the host, and the assumption does not always hold.
Note: gethostname() doesn’t always return the fully qualified domain name; use getfqdn() (see above).
Convert an IPv4 address from dotted-quad string format (for example, ‘123.45.67.89’) to 32-bit packed binary format, as a bytes object four characters in length. This is useful when conversing with a program that uses the standard C library and needs objects of type struct in_addr, which is the C type for the 32-bit packed binary this function returns.
inet_aton() also accepts strings with less than three dots; see the Unix manual page inet(3) for details.
If the IPv4 address string passed to this function is invalid, socket.error will be raised. Note that exactly what is valid depends on the underlying C implementation of inet_aton().
inet_aton() does not support IPv6, and inet_pton() should be used instead for IPv4/v6 dual stack support.
Convert a 32-bit packed IPv4 address (a bytes object four characters in length) to its standard dotted-quad string representation (for example, ‘123.45.67.89’). This is useful when conversing with a program that uses the standard C library and needs objects of type struct in_addr, which is the C type for the 32-bit packed binary data this function takes as an argument.
If the byte sequence passed to this function is not exactly 4 bytes in length, socket.error will be raised. inet_ntoa() does not support IPv6, and inet_ntop() should be used instead for IPv4/v6 dual stack support.
Convert an IP address from its family-specific string format to a packed, binary format. inet_pton() is useful when a library or network protocol calls for an object of type struct in_addr (similar to inet_aton()) or struct in6_addr.
Supported values for address_family are currently AF_INET and AF_INET6. If the IP address string ip_string is invalid, socket.error will be raised. Note that exactly what is valid depends on both the value of address_family and the underlying implementation of inet_pton().
Availability: Unix (maybe not all platforms).
Convert a packed IP address (a bytes object of some number of characters) to its standard, family-specific string representation (for example, '7.10.0.5' or '5aef:2b::8'). inet_ntop() is useful when a library or network protocol returns an object of type struct in_addr (similar to inet_ntoa()) or struct in6_addr.
Supported values for address_family are currently AF_INET and AF_INET6. If the string packed_ip is not the correct length for the specified address family, ValueError will be raised. A socket.error is raised for errors from the call to inet_ntop().
Availability: Unix (maybe not all platforms).
See also
Socket objects have the following methods. Except for makefile() these correspond to Unix system calls applicable to sockets.
Return the socket’s file descriptor (a small integer). This is useful with select.select().
Under Windows the small integer returned by this method cannot be used where a file descriptor can be used (such as os.fdopen()). Unix does not have this limitation.
| Platform: | Windows |
|---|
The ioctl() method is a limited interface to the WSAIoctl system interface. Please refer to the Win32 documentation for more information.
On other platforms, the generic fcntl.fcntl() and fcntl.ioctl() functions may be used; they accept a socket object as their first argument.
Return a file object associated with the socket. The exact returned type depends on the arguments given to makefile(). These arguments are interpreted the same way as by the built-in open() function.
Closing the file object won’t close the socket unless there are no remaining references to the socket. The socket must be in blocking mode (it can not have a timeout).
Receive data from the socket. The return value is a bytes object representing the data received. The maximum amount of data to be received at once is specified by bufsize. See the Unix manual page recv(2) for the meaning of the optional argument flags; it defaults to zero.
Note
For best match with hardware and network realities, the value of bufsize should be a relatively small power of 2, for example, 4096.
Some notes on socket blocking and timeouts: A socket object can be in one of three modes: blocking, non-blocking, or timeout. Sockets are always created in blocking mode. In blocking mode, operations block until complete or the system returns an error (such as connection timed out). In non-blocking mode, operations fail (with an error that is unfortunately system-dependent) if they cannot be completed immediately. In timeout mode, operations fail if they cannot be completed within the timeout specified for the socket or if the system returns an error. The setblocking() method is simply a shorthand for certain settimeout() calls.
Timeout mode internally sets the socket in non-blocking mode. The blocking and timeout modes are shared between file descriptors and socket objects that refer to the same network endpoint. A consequence of this is that file objects returned by the makefile() method must only be used when the socket is in blocking mode; in timeout or non-blocking mode file operations that cannot be completed immediately will fail.
Note that the connect() operation is subject to the timeout setting, and in general it is recommended to call settimeout() before calling connect() or pass a timeout parameter to create_connection(). The system network stack may return a connection timeout error of its own regardless of any Python socket timeout setting.
Set the value of the given socket option (see the Unix manual page setsockopt(2)). The needed symbolic constants are defined in the socket module (SO_* etc.). The value can be an integer or a bytes object representing a buffer. In the latter case it is up to the caller to ensure that the bytestring contains the proper bits (see the optional built-in module struct for a way to encode C structures as bytestrings).
Note that there are no methods read() or write(); use recv() and send() without flags argument instead.
Socket objects also have these (read-only) attributes that correspond to the values given to the socket constructor.
Here are four minimal example programs using the TCP/IP protocol: a server that echoes all data that it receives back (servicing only one client), and a client using it. Note that a server must perform the sequence socket(), bind(), listen(), accept() (possibly repeating the accept() to service more than one client), while a client only needs the sequence socket(), connect(). Also note that the server does not send()/recv() on the socket it is listening on but on the new socket returned by accept().
The first two examples support IPv4 only.
# Echo server program
import socket
HOST = '' # Symbolic name meaning all available interfaces
PORT = 50007 # Arbitrary non-privileged port
s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.bind((HOST, PORT))
s.listen(1)
conn, addr = s.accept()
print('Connected by', addr)
while True:
data = conn.recv(1024)
if not data: break
conn.send(data)
conn.close()
# Echo client program
import socket
HOST = 'daring.cwi.nl' # The remote host
PORT = 50007 # The same port as used by the server
s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.connect((HOST, PORT))
s.send(b'Hello, world')
data = s.recv(1024)
s.close()
print('Received', repr(data))
The next two examples are identical to the above two, but support both IPv4 and IPv6. The server side will listen to the first address family available (it should listen to both instead). On most of IPv6-ready systems, IPv6 will take precedence and the server may not accept IPv4 traffic. The client side will try to connect to the all addresses returned as a result of the name resolution, and sends traffic to the first one connected successfully.
# Echo server program
import socket
import sys
HOST = None # Symbolic name meaning all available interfaces
PORT = 50007 # Arbitrary non-privileged port
s = None
for res in socket.getaddrinfo(HOST, PORT, socket.AF_UNSPEC,
socket.SOCK_STREAM, 0, socket.AI_PASSIVE):
af, socktype, proto, canonname, sa = res
try:
s = socket.socket(af, socktype, proto)
except socket.error as msg:
s = None
continue
try:
s.bind(sa)
s.listen(1)
except socket.error as msg:
s.close()
s = None
continue
break
if s is None:
print('could not open socket')
sys.exit(1)
conn, addr = s.accept()
print('Connected by', addr)
while True:
data = conn.recv(1024)
if not data: break
conn.send(data)
conn.close()
# Echo client program
import socket
import sys
HOST = 'daring.cwi.nl' # The remote host
PORT = 50007 # The same port as used by the server
s = None
for res in socket.getaddrinfo(HOST, PORT, socket.AF_UNSPEC, socket.SOCK_STREAM):
af, socktype, proto, canonname, sa = res
try:
s = socket.socket(af, socktype, proto)
except socket.error as msg:
s = None
continue
try:
s.connect(sa)
except socket.error as msg:
s.close()
s = None
continue
break
if s is None:
print('could not open socket')
sys.exit(1)
s.send(b'Hello, world')
data = s.recv(1024)
s.close()
print('Received', repr(data))
The last example shows how to write a very simple network sniffer with raw sockets on Windows. The example requires administrator privileges to modify the interface:
import socket
# the public network interface
HOST = socket.gethostbyname(socket.gethostname())
# create a raw socket and bind it to the public interface
s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_RAW, socket.IPPROTO_IP)
s.bind((HOST, 0))
# Include IP headers
s.setsockopt(socket.IPPROTO_IP, socket.IP_HDRINCL, 1)
# receive all packages
s.ioctl(socket.SIO_RCVALL, socket.RCVALL_ON)
# receive a package
print(s.recvfrom(65565))
# disabled promiscuous mode
s.ioctl(socket.SIO_RCVALL, socket.RCVALL_OFF)