This package contains two Socket.IO clients:
- The socketio.Client() class creates a client compatible with the
standard Python library.
- The socketio.AsyncClient() class creates a client compatible with
the asyncio package.
The methods in the two clients are the same, with the only
difference that in the asyncio client most methods are implemented as
coroutines.
To install the standard Python client along with its dependencies,
use the following command:
pip install "python-socketio[client]"
If instead you plan on using the asyncio client, then use
this:
pip install "python-socketio[asyncio_client]"
To instantiate an Socket.IO client, simply create an instance of
the appropriate client class:
import socketio
# standard Python
sio = socketio.Client()
# asyncio
sio = socketio.AsyncClient()
Defining Event Handlers
The Socket.IO protocol is event based. When a server wants to
communicate with a client it emits an event. Each event has a name,
and a list of arguments. The client registers event handler functions with
the socketio.Client.event() or socketio.Client.on()
decorators:
@sio.event
def message(data):
print('I received a message!')
@sio.on('my message')
def on_message(data):
print('I received a message!')
In the first example the event name is obtained from the name of
the handler function. The second example is slightly more verbose, but it
allows the event name to be different than the function name or to include
characters that are illegal in function names, such as spaces.
For the asyncio client, event handlers can be regular
functions as above, or can also be coroutines:
@sio.event
async def message(data):
print('I received a message!')
The connect, connect_error and disconnect
events are special; they are invoked automatically when a client connects or
disconnects from the server:
@sio.event
def connect():
print("I'm connected!")
@sio.event
def connect_error():
print("The connection failed!")
@sio.event
def disconnect():
print("I'm disconnected!")
Note that the disconnect handler is invoked for application
initiated disconnects, server initiated disconnects, or accidental
disconnects, for example due to networking failures. In the case of an
accidental disconnection, the client is going to attempt to reconnect
immediately after invoking the disconnect handler. As soon as the connection
is re-established the connect handler will be invoked once again.
If the server includes arguments with an event, those are passed
to the handler function as arguments.
The connection to a server is established by calling the
connect() method:
sio.connect('http://localhost:5000')
In the case of the asyncio client, the method is a
coroutine:
await sio.connect('http://localhost:5000')
Upon connection, the server assigns the client a unique session
identifier. The applicaction can find this identifier in the sid
attribute:
print('my sid is', sio.sid)
Emitting Events
The client can emit an event to the server using the emit()
method:
sio.emit('my message', {'foo': 'bar'})
Or in the case of asyncio, as a coroutine:
await sio.emit('my message', {'foo': 'bar'})
The single argument provided to the method is the data that is
passed on to the server. The data can be of type str, bytes,
dict, list or tuple. When sending a tuple, the
elements in it need to be of any of the other four allowed types. The
elements of the tuple will be passed as multiple arguments to the
server-side event handler function.
The emit() method can be invoked inside an event handler as
a response to a server event, or in any other part of the application,
including in background tasks.
Event Callbacks
When a server emits an event to a client, it can optionally
provide a callback function, to be invoked as a way of acknowledgment that
the server has processed the event. While this is entirely managed by the
server, the client can provide a list of return values that are to be passed
on to the callback function set up by the server. This is achieved simply by
returning the desired values from the handler function:
@sio.event
def my_event(sid, data):
# handle the message
return "OK", 123
Likewise, the client can request a callback function to be invoked
after the server has processed an event. The socketio.Server.emit()
method has an optional callback argument that can be set to a
callable. If this argument is given, the callable will be invoked after the
server has processed the event, and any values returned by the server
handler will be passed as arguments to this function.
The Socket.IO protocol supports multiple logical connections, all
multiplexed on the same physical connection. Clients can open multiple
connections by specifying a different namespace on each. Namespaces
use a path syntax starting with a forward slash. A list of namespaces can be
given by the client in the connect() call. For example, this example
creates two logical connections, the default one plus a second connection
under the /chat namespace:
sio.connect('http://localhost:5000', namespaces=['/chat'])
To define event handlers on a namespace, the namespace
argument must be added to the corresponding decorator:
@sio.event(namespace='/chat')
def my_custom_event(sid, data):
pass
@sio.on('connect', namespace='/chat')
def on_connect():
print("I'm connected to the /chat namespace!")
Likewise, the client can emit an event to the server on a
namespace by providing its in the emit() call:
sio.emit('my message', {'foo': 'bar'}, namespace='/chat')
If the namespaces argument of the connect() call
isn't given, any namespaces used in event handlers are automatically
connected.
Class-Based Namespaces
As an alternative to the decorator-based event handlers, the event
handlers that belong to a namespace can be created as methods of a subclass
of socketio.ClientNamespace:
class MyCustomNamespace(socketio.ClientNamespace):
def on_connect(self):
pass
def on_disconnect(self):
pass
def on_my_event(self, data):
self.emit('my_response', data)
sio.register_namespace(MyCustomNamespace('/chat'))
For asyncio based servers, namespaces must inherit from
socketio.AsyncClientNamespace, and can define event handlers as
coroutines if desired:
class MyCustomNamespace(socketio.AsyncClientNamespace):
def on_connect(self):
pass
def on_disconnect(self):
pass
async def on_my_event(self, data):
await self.emit('my_response', data)
sio.register_namespace(MyCustomNamespace('/chat'))
When class-based namespaces are used, any events received by the
client are dispatched to a method named as the event name with the
on_ prefix. For example, event my_event will be handled by a
method named on_my_event. If an event is received for which there is
no corresponding method defined in the namespace class, then the event is
ignored. All event names used in class-based namespaces must use characters
that are legal in method names.
As a convenience to methods defined in a class-based namespace,
the namespace instance includes versions of several of the methods in the
socketio.Client and socketio.AsyncClient classes that default
to the proper namespace when the namespace argument is not given.
In the case that an event has a handler in a class-based
namespace, and also a decorator-based function handler, only the standalone
function handler is invoked.
At any time the client can request to be disconnected from the
server by invoking the disconnect() method:
For the asyncio client this is a coroutine:
When a client connection to the server is established, a few
background tasks will be spawned to keep the connection alive and handle
incoming events. The application running on the main thread is free to do
any work, as this is not going to prevent the functioning of the Socket.IO
client.
If the application does not have anything to do in the main thread
and just wants to wait until the connection with the server ends, it can
call the wait() method:
Or in the asyncio version:
For the convenience of the application, a helper function is
provided to start a custom background task:
def my_background_task(my_argument):
# do some background work here!
pass
sio.start_background_task(my_background_task, 123)
The arguments passed to this method are the background function
and any positional or keyword arguments to invoke the function with.
Here is the asyncio version:
async def my_background_task(my_argument):
# do some background work here!
pass
sio.start_background_task(my_background_task, 123)
Note that this function is not a coroutine, since it does not wait
for the background function to end. The background function must be a
coroutine.
The sleep() method is a second convenince function that is
provided for the benefit of applications working with background tasks of
their own:
Or for asyncio:
The single argument passed to the method is the number of seconds
to sleep for.
Debugging and Troubleshooting
To help you debug issues, the client can be configured to output
logs to the terminal:
import socketio
# standard Python
sio = socketio.Client(logger=True, engineio_logger=True)
# asyncio
sio = socketio.AsyncClient(logger=True, engineio_logger=True)
The logger argument controls logging related to the
Socket.IO protocol, while engineio_logger controls logs that
originate in the low-level Engine.IO transport. These arguments can be set
to True to output logs to stderr, or to an object compatible
with Python's logging package where the logs should be emitted to. A
value of False disables logging.
Logging can help identify the cause of connection problems,
unexpected disconnections and other issues.
This package contains two Socket.IO servers:
- The socketio.Server() class creates a server compatible with the
Python standard library.
- The socketio.AsyncServer() class creates a server compatible with
the asyncio package.
The methods in the two servers are the same, with the only
difference that in the asyncio server most methods are implemented as
coroutines.
To install the Socket.IO server along with its dependencies, use
the following command:
pip install python-socketio
In addition to the server, you will need to select an asynchronous
framework or server to use along with it. The list of supported packages is
covered in the Deployment Strategies section.
A Socket.IO server is an instance of class socketio.Server.
This instance can be transformed into a standard WSGI application by
wrapping it with the socketio.WSGIApp class:
import socketio
# create a Socket.IO server
sio = socketio.Server()
# wrap with a WSGI application
app = socketio.WSGIApp(sio)
For asyncio based servers, the socketio.AsyncServer class
provides the same functionality, but in a coroutine friendly format. If
desired, The socketio.ASGIApp class can transform the server into a
standard ASGI application:
# create a Socket.IO server
sio = socketio.AsyncServer()
# wrap with ASGI application
app = socketio.ASGIApp(sio)
These two wrappers can also act as middlewares, forwarding any
traffic that is not intended to the Socket.IO server to another application.
This allows Socket.IO servers to integrate easily into existing WSGI or ASGI
applications:
from wsgi import app # a Flask, Django, etc. application
app = socketio.WSGIApp(sio, app)
The Engine.IO server can be configured to serve static files to
clients. This is particularly useful to deliver HTML, CSS and JavaScript
files to clients when this package is used without a companion web
framework.
Static files are configured with a Python dictionary in which each
key/value pair is a static file mapping rule. In its simplest form, this
dictionary has one or more static file URLs as keys, and the corresponding
files in the server as values:
static_files = {
'/': 'latency.html',
'/static/socket.io.js': 'static/socket.io.js',
'/static/style.css': 'static/style.css',
}
With this example configuration, when the server receives a
request for / (the root URL) it will return the contents of the file
latency.html in the current directory, and will assign a content type
based on the file extension, in this case text/html.
Files with the .html, .css, .js,
.json, .jpg, .png, .gif and .txt file
extensions are automatically recognized and assigned the correct content
type. For files with other file extensions or with no file extension, the
application/octet-stream content type is used as a default.
If desired, an explicit content type for a static file can be
given as follows:
static_files = {
'/': {'filename': 'latency.html', 'content_type': 'text/plain'},
}
It is also possible to configure an entire directory in a single
rule, so that all the files in it are served as static files:
static_files = {
'/static': './public',
}
In this example any files with URLs starting with /static
will be served directly from the public folder in the current
directory, so for example, the URL /static/index.html will return
local file ./public/index.html and the URL
/static/css/styles.css will return local file
./public/css/styles.css.
If a URL that ends in a / is requested, then a default
filename of index.html is appended to it. In the previous example, a
request for the /static/ URL would return local file
./public/index.html. The default filename to serve for slash-ending
URLs can be set in the static files dictionary with an empty key:
static_files = {
'/static': './public',
'': 'image.gif',
}
With this configuration, a request for /static/ would
return local file ./public/image.gif. A non-standard content type can
also be specified if needed:
static_files = {
'/static': './public',
'': {'filename': 'image.gif', 'content_type': 'text/plain'},
}
The static file configuration dictionary is given as the
static_files argument to the socketio.WSGIApp or
socketio.ASGIApp classes:
# for standard WSGI applications
sio = socketio.Server()
app = socketio.WSGIApp(sio, static_files=static_files)
# for asyncio-based ASGI applications
sio = socketio.AsyncServer()
app = socketio.ASGIApp(sio, static_files=static_files)
The routing precedence in these two classes is as follows:
- First, the path is checked against the Socket.IO endpoint.
- Next, the path is checked against the static file configuration, if
present.
- If the path did not match the Socket.IO endpoint or any static file,
control is passed to the secondary application if configured, else a 404
error is returned.
Note: static file serving is intended for development use only,
and as such it lacks important features such as caching. Do not use in a
production environment.
Defining Event Handlers
The Socket.IO protocol is event based. When a client wants to
communicate with the server it emits an event. Each event has a name,
and a list of arguments. The server registers event handler functions with
the socketio.Server.event() or socketio.Server.on()
decorators:
@sio.event
def my_event(sid, data):
pass
@sio.on('my custom event')
def another_event(sid, data):
pass
In the first example the event name is obtained from the name of
the handler function. The second example is slightly more verbose, but it
allows the event name to be different than the function name or to include
characters that are illegal in function names, such as spaces.
For asyncio servers, event handlers can optionally be given as
coroutines:
@sio.event
async def my_event(sid, data):
pass
The sid argument is the Socket.IO session id, a unique
identifier of each client connection. All the events sent by a given client
will have the same sid value.
The connect and disconnect events are special; they
are invoked automatically when a client connects or disconnects from the
server:
@sio.event
def connect(sid, environ):
print('connect ', sid)
@sio.event
def disconnect(sid):
print('disconnect ', sid)
The connect event is an ideal place to perform user
authentication, and any necessary mapping between user entities in the
application and the sid that was assigned to the client. The
environ argument is a dictionary in standard WSGI format containing
the request information, including HTTP headers. After inspecting the
request, the connect event handler can return False to reject the
connection with the client.
Sometimes it is useful to pass data back to the client being
rejected. In that case instead of returning False
socketio.exceptions.ConnectionRefusedError can be raised, and all of
its arguments will be sent to the client with the rejection message:
@sio.event
def connect(sid, environ):
raise ConnectionRefusedError('authentication failed')
Emitting Events
Socket.IO is a bidirectional protocol, so at any time the server
can send an event to its connected clients. The
socketio.Server.emit() method is used for this task:
sio.emit('my event', {'data': 'foobar'})
Sometimes the server may want to send an event just to a
particular client. This can be achieved by adding a room argument to
the emit call:
sio.emit('my event', {'data': 'foobar'}, room=user_sid)
The socketio.Server.emit() method takes an event name, a
message payload of type str, bytes, list, dict
or tuple, and the recipient room. When sending a tuple, the
elements in it need to be of any of the other four allowed types. The
elements of the tuple will be passed as multiple arguments to the
client-side event handler function. The room argument is used to
identify the client that should receive the event, and is set to the
sid value assigned to that client's connection with the server. When
omitted, the event is broadcasted to all connected clients.
Event Callbacks
When a client sends an event to the server, it can optionally
provide a callback function, to be invoked as a way of acknowledgment that
the server has processed the event. While this is entirely managed by the
client, the server can provide a list of values that are to be passed on to
the callback function, simply by returning them from the handler
function:
@sio.event
def my_event(sid, data):
# handle the message
return "OK", 123
Likewise, the server can request a callback function to be invoked
after a client has processed an event. The socketio.Server.emit()
method has an optional callback argument that can be set to a
callable. If this argument is given, the callable will be invoked after the
client has processed the event, and any values returned by the client will
be passed as arguments to this function. Using callback functions when
broadcasting to multiple clients is not recommended, as the callback
function will be invoked once for each client that received the message.
The Socket.IO protocol supports multiple logical connections, all
multiplexed on the same physical connection. Clients can open multiple
connections by specifying a different namespace on each. A namespace
is given by the client as a pathname following the hostname and port. For
example, connecting to http://example.com:8000/chat would open a
connection to the namespace /chat.
Each namespace is handled independently from the others, with
separate session IDs (sids), event handlers and rooms. It is
important that applications that use multiple namespaces specify the correct
namespace when setting up their event handlers and rooms, using the optional
namespace argument available in all the methods in the
socketio.Server class:
@sio.event(namespace='/chat')
def my_custom_event(sid, data):
pass
@sio.on('my custom event', namespace='/chat')
def my_custom_event(sid, data):
pass
When emitting an event, the namespace optional argument is
used to specify which namespace to send it on. When the namespace
argument is omitted, the default Socket.IO namespace, which is named
/, is used.
Class-Based Namespaces
As an alternative to the decorator-based event handlers, the event
handlers that belong to a namespace can be created as methods of a subclass
of socketio.Namespace:
class MyCustomNamespace(socketio.Namespace):
def on_connect(self, sid, environ):
pass
def on_disconnect(self, sid):
pass
def on_my_event(self, sid, data):
self.emit('my_response', data)
sio.register_namespace(MyCustomNamespace('/test'))
For asyncio based severs, namespaces must inherit from
socketio.AsyncNamespace, and can define event handlers as coroutines
if desired:
class MyCustomNamespace(socketio.AsyncNamespace):
def on_connect(self, sid, environ):
pass
def on_disconnect(self, sid):
pass
async def on_my_event(self, sid, data):
await self.emit('my_response', data)
sio.register_namespace(MyCustomNamespace('/test'))
When class-based namespaces are used, any events received by the
server are dispatched to a method named as the event name with the
on_ prefix. For example, event my_event will be handled by a
method named on_my_event. If an event is received for which there is
no corresponding method defined in the namespace class, then the event is
ignored. All event names used in class-based namespaces must use characters
that are legal in method names.
As a convenience to methods defined in a class-based namespace,
the namespace instance includes versions of several of the methods in the
socketio.Server and socketio.AsyncServer classes that default
to the proper namespace when the namespace argument is not given.
In the case that an event has a handler in a class-based
namespace, and also a decorator-based function handler, only the standalone
function handler is invoked.
It is important to note that class-based namespaces are
singletons. This means that a single instance of a namespace class is used
for all clients, and consequently, a namespace instance cannot be used to
store client specific information.
To make it easy for the server to emit events to groups of related
clients, the application can put its clients into "rooms", and
then address messages to these rooms.
In the previous section the room argument of the
socketio.SocketIO.emit() method was used to designate a specific
client as the recipient of the event. This is because upon connection, a
personal room for each client is created and named with the sid
assigned to the connection. The application is then free to create
additional rooms and manage which clients are in them using the
socketio.Server.enter_room() and socketio.Server.leave_room()
methods. Clients can be in as many rooms as needed and can be moved between
rooms as often as necessary.
@sio.event
def begin_chat(sid):
sio.enter_room(sid, 'chat_users')
@sio.event
def exit_chat(sid):
sio.leave_room(sid, 'chat_users')
In chat applications it is often desired that an event is
broadcasted to all the members of the room except one, which is the
originator of the event such as a chat message. The
socketio.Server.emit() method provides an optional skip_sid
argument to indicate a client that should be skipped during the
broadcast.
@sio.event
def my_message(sid, data):
sio.emit('my reply', data, room='chat_users', skip_sid=sid)
The server can maintain application-specific information in a user
session dedicated to each connected client. Applications can use the user
session to write any details about the user that need to be preserved
throughout the life of the connection, such as usernames or user ids.
The save_session() and get_session() methods are
used to store and retrieve information in the user session:
@sio.event
def connect(sid, environ):
username = authenticate_user(environ)
sio.save_session(sid, {'username': username})
@sio.event
def message(sid, data):
session = sio.get_session(sid)
print('message from ', session['username'])
For the asyncio server, these methods are coroutines:
@sio.event
async def connect(sid, environ):
username = authenticate_user(environ)
await sio.save_session(sid, {'username': username})
@sio.event
async def message(sid, data):
session = await sio.get_session(sid)
print('message from ', session['username'])
The session can also be manipulated with the session()
context manager:
@sio.event
def connect(sid, environ):
username = authenticate_user(environ)
with sio.session(sid) as session:
session['username'] = username
@sio.event
def message(sid, data):
with sio.session(sid) as session:
print('message from ', session['username'])
For the asyncio server, an asynchronous context manager is
used:
@sio.event
def connect(sid, environ):
username = authenticate_user(environ)
async with sio.session(sid) as session:
session['username'] = username
@sio.event
def message(sid, data):
async with sio.session(sid) as session:
print('message from ', session['username'])
The get_session(), save_session() and
session() methods take an optional namespace argument. If this
argument isn't provided, the session is attached to the default
namespace.
Note: the contents of the user session are destroyed when the
client disconnects. In particular, user session contents are not preserved
when a client reconnects after an unexpected disconnection from the
server.
When working with distributed applications, it is often necessary
to access the functionality of the Socket.IO from multiple processes. There
are two specific use cases:
- Applications that use work queues such as Celery may need to emit
an event to a client once a background job completes. The most convenient
place to carry out this task is the worker process that handled this
job.
- Highly available applications may want to use horizontal scaling of the
Socket.IO server to be able to handle very large number of concurrent
clients.
As a solution to the above problems, the Socket.IO server can be
configured to connect to a message queue such as Redis or
RabbitMQ, to communicate with other related Socket.IO servers or
auxiliary workers.
To use a Redis message queue, a Python Redis client must be
installed:
# socketio.Server class
pip install redis
# socketio.AsyncServer class
pip install aioredis
The Redis queue is configured through the
socketio.RedisManager and socketio.AsyncRedisManager classes.
These classes connect directly to the Redis store and use the queue's
pub/sub functionality:
# socketio.Server class
mgr = socketio.RedisManager('redis://')
sio = socketio.Server(client_manager=mgr)
# socketio.AsyncServer class
mgr = socketio.AsyncRedisManager('redis://')
sio = socketio.AsyncServer(client_manager=mgr)
The client_manager argument instructs the server to connect
to the given message queue, and to coordinate with other processes connected
to the queue.
Kombu is a Python package that provides access to RabbitMQ
and many other message queues. It can be installed with pip:
To use RabbitMQ or other AMQP protocol compatible queues, that is
the only required dependency. But for other message queues, Kombu may
require additional packages. For example, to use a Redis queue via Kombu,
the Python package for Redis needs to be installed as well:
The queue is configured through the
socketio.KombuManager:
mgr = socketio.KombuManager('amqp://')
sio = socketio.Server(client_manager=mgr)
The connection URL passed to the KombuManager constructor
is passed directly to Kombu's Connection object, so the Kombu
documentation should be consulted for information on how to build the
correct URL for a given message queue.
Note that Kombu currently does not support asyncio, so it cannot
be used with the socketio.AsyncServer class.
Apache Kafka is supported through the kafka-python
package:
Access to Kafka is configured through the
socketio.KafkaManager class:
mgr = socketio.KafkaManager('kafka://')
sio = socketio.Server(client_manager=mgr)
Note that Kafka currently does not support asyncio, so it cannot
be used with the socketio.AsyncServer class.
A RabbitMQ message queue is supported in asyncio applications
through the AioPika package:: You need to install aio_pika with
pip:
The RabbitMQ queue is configured through the
socketio.AsyncAioPikaManager class:
mgr = socketio.AsyncAioPikaManager('amqp://')
sio = socketio.AsyncServer(client_manager=mgr)
To have a process other than a server connect to the queue to emit
a message, the same client manager classes can be used as standalone
objects. In this case, the write_only argument should be set to
True to disable the creation of a listening thread, which only makes
sense in a server. For example:
# connect to the redis queue as an external process
external_sio = socketio.RedisManager('redis://', write_only=True)
# emit an event
external_sio.emit('my event', data={'foo': 'bar'}, room='my room')
Debugging and Troubleshooting
To help you debug issues, the server can be configured to output
logs to the terminal:
import socketio
# standard Python
sio = socketio.Server(logger=True, engineio_logger=True)
# asyncio
sio = socketio.AsyncServer(logger=True, engineio_logger=True)
The logger argument controls logging related to the
Socket.IO protocol, while engineio_logger controls logs that
originate in the low-level Engine.IO transport. These arguments can be set
to True to output logs to stderr, or to an object compatible
with Python's logging package where the logs should be emitted to. A
value of False disables logging.
Logging can help identify the cause of connection problems, 400
responses, bad performance and other issues.
The following sections describe a variety of deployment strategies
for Socket.IO servers.
Aiohttp is a framework with support for HTTP and WebSocket,
based on asyncio. Support for this framework is limited to Python 3.5 and
newer.
Instances of class socketio.AsyncServer will automatically
use aiohttp for asynchronous operations if the library is installed. To
request its use explicitly, the async_mode option can be given in the
constructor:
sio = socketio.AsyncServer(async_mode='aiohttp')
A server configured for aiohttp must be attached to an existing
application:
app = web.Application()
sio.attach(app)
The aiohttp application can define regular routes that will
coexist with the Socket.IO server. A typical pattern is to add routes that
serve a client application and any associated static files.
The aiohttp application is then executed in the usual manner:
if __name__ == '__main__':
web.run_app(app)
Tornado is a web framework with support for HTTP and
WebSocket. Support for this framework requires Python 3.5 and newer. Only
Tornado version 5 and newer are supported, thanks to its tight integration
with asyncio.
Instances of class socketio.AsyncServer will automatically
use tornado for asynchronous operations if the library is installed. To
request its use explicitly, the async_mode option can be given in the
constructor:
sio = socketio.AsyncServer(async_mode='tornado')
A server configured for tornado must include a request handler for
Socket.IO:
app = tornado.web.Application(
[
(r"/socket.io/", socketio.get_tornado_handler(sio)),
],
# ... other application options
)
The tornado application can define other routes that will coexist
with the Socket.IO server. A typical pattern is to add routes that serve a
client application and any associated static files.
The tornado application is then executed in the usual manner:
app.listen(port)
tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.current().start()
Sanic is a very efficient asynchronous web server for
Python 3.5 and newer.
Instances of class socketio.AsyncServer will automatically
use Sanic for asynchronous operations if the framework is installed. To
request its use explicitly, the async_mode option can be given in the
constructor:
sio = socketio.AsyncServer(async_mode='sanic')
A server configured for aiohttp must be attached to an existing
application:
app = Sanic()
sio.attach(app)
The Sanic application can define regular routes that will coexist
with the Socket.IO server. A typical pattern is to add routes that serve a
client application and any associated static files.
The Sanic application is then executed in the usual manner:
if __name__ == '__main__':
app.run()
It has been reported that the CORS support provided by the Sanic
extension sanic-cors is incomaptible with this package's own support
for this protocol. To disable CORS support in this package and let Sanic
take full control, initialize the server as follows:
sio = socketio.AsyncServer(async_mode='sanic', cors_allowed_origins=[])
On the Sanic side you will need to enable the
CORS_SUPPORTS_CREDENTIALS setting in addition to any other
configuration that you use:
app.config['CORS_SUPPORTS_CREDENTIALS'] = True
The socketio.ASGIApp class is an ASGI compatible
application that can forward Socket.IO traffic to an
socketio.AsyncServer instance:
sio = socketio.AsyncServer(async_mode='asgi')
app = socketio.ASGIApp(sio)
The application can then be deployed with any ASGI compatible web
server.
Eventlet is a high performance concurrent networking
library for Python 2 and 3 that uses coroutines, enabling code to be written
in the same style used with the blocking standard library functions. An
Socket.IO server deployed with eventlet has access to the long-polling and
WebSocket transports.
Instances of class socketio.Server will automatically use
eventlet for asynchronous operations if the library is installed. To request
its use explicitly, the async_mode option can be given in the
constructor:
sio = socketio.Server(async_mode='eventlet')
A server configured for eventlet is deployed as a regular WSGI
application using the provided socketio.WSGIApp:
app = socketio.WSGIApp(sio)
import eventlet
eventlet.wsgi.server(eventlet.listen(('', 8000)), app)
An alternative to running the eventlet WSGI server as above is to
use gunicorn, a fully featured pure Python web server. The command to
launch the application under gunicorn is shown below:
$ gunicorn -k eventlet -w 1 module:app
Due to limitations in its load balancing algorithm, gunicorn can
only be used with one worker process, so the -w option cannot be set
to a value higher than 1. A single eventlet worker can handle a large number
of concurrent clients, each handled by a greenlet.
Eventlet provides a monkey_patch() function that replaces
all the blocking functions in the standard library with equivalent
asynchronous versions. While python-socketio does not require monkey
patching, other libraries such as database drivers are likely to require
it.
Gevent is another asynchronous framework based on
coroutines, very similar to eventlet. An Socket.IO server deployed with
gevent has access to the long-polling transport. If project
gevent-websocket is installed, the WebSocket transport is also
available.
Instances of class socketio.Server will automatically use
gevent for asynchronous operations if the library is installed and eventlet
is not installed. To request gevent to be selected explicitly, the
async_mode option can be given in the constructor:
sio = socketio.Server(async_mode='gevent')
A server configured for gevent is deployed as a regular WSGI
application using the provided socketio.WSGIApp:
app = socketio.WSGIApp(sio)
from gevent import pywsgi
pywsgi.WSGIServer(('', 8000), app).serve_forever()
If the WebSocket transport is installed, then the server must be
started as follows:
from gevent import pywsgi
from geventwebsocket.handler import WebSocketHandler
app = socketio.WSGIApp(sio)
pywsgi.WSGIServer(('', 8000), app,
handler_class=WebSocketHandler).serve_forever()
An alternative to running the gevent WSGI server as above is to
use gunicorn, a fully featured pure Python web server. The command to
launch the application under gunicorn is shown below:
$ gunicorn -k gevent -w 1 module:app
Or to include WebSocket:
$ gunicorn -k geventwebsocket.gunicorn.workers.GeventWebSocketWorker -w 1 module: app
Same as with eventlet, due to limitations in its load balancing
algorithm, gunicorn can only be used with one worker process, so the
-w option cannot be higher than 1. A single gevent worker can handle
a large number of concurrent clients through the use of greenlets.
Gevent provides a monkey_patch() function that replaces all
the blocking functions in the standard library with equivalent asynchronous
versions. While python-socketio does not require monkey patching, other
libraries such as database drivers are likely to require it.
When using the uWSGI server in combination with gevent, the
Socket.IO server can take advantage of uWSGI's native WebSocket support.
Instances of class socketio.Server will automatically use
this option for asynchronous operations if both gevent and uWSGI are
installed and eventlet is not installed. To request this asynchronous mode
explicitly, the async_mode option can be given in the
constructor:
# gevent with uWSGI
sio = socketio.Server(async_mode='gevent_uwsgi')
A complete explanation of the configuration and usage of the uWSGI
server is beyond the scope of this documentation. The uWSGI server is a
fairly complex package that provides a large and comprehensive set of
options. It must be compiled with WebSocket and SSL support for the
WebSocket transport to be available. As way of an introduction, the
following command starts a uWSGI server for the latency.py example on
port 5000:
$ uwsgi --http :5000 --gevent 1000 --http-websockets --master --wsgi-file latency.py --callable app
While not comparable to eventlet and gevent in terms of
performance, the Socket.IO server can also be configured to work with
multi-threaded web servers that use standard Python threads. This is an
ideal setup to use with development servers such as Werkzeug. Only
the long-polling transport is currently available when using standard
threads.
Instances of class socketio.Server will automatically use
the threading mode if neither eventlet nor gevent are not installed. To
request the threading mode explicitly, the async_mode option can be
given in the constructor:
sio = socketio.Server(async_mode='threading')
A server configured for threading is deployed as a regular web
application, using any WSGI complaint multi-threaded server. The example
below deploys an Socket.IO application combined with a Flask web
application, using Flask's development web server based on Werkzeug:
sio = socketio.Server(async_mode='threading')
app = Flask(__name__)
app.wsgi_app = socketio.WSGIApp(sio, app.wsgi_app)
# ... Socket.IO and Flask handler functions ...
if __name__ == '__main__':
app.run(threaded=True)
When using the threading mode, it is important to ensure that the
WSGI server can handle multiple concurrent requests using threads, since a
client can have up to two outstanding requests at any given time. The
Werkzeug server is single-threaded by default, so the threaded=True
option is required.
Note that servers that use worker processes instead of threads,
such as gunicorn, do not support a Socket.IO server configured in threading
mode.
Socket.IO is a stateful protocol, which makes horizontal scaling
more difficult. To deploy a cluster of Socket.IO processes hosted on one or
multiple servers, the following conditions must be met:
- Each Socket.IO process must be able to handle multiple requests
concurrently. This is required because long-polling clients send two
requests in parallel. Worker processes that can only handle one request at
a time are not supported.
- The load balancer must be configured to always forward requests from a
client to the same worker process. Load balancers call this sticky
sessions, or session affinity.
- The worker processes need to communicate with each other to coordinate
complex operations such as broadcasts. This is done through a configured
message queue. See the section on using message queues for details.
For security reasons, this server enforces a same-origin policy by
default. In practical terms, this means the following:
- If an incoming HTTP or WebSocket request includes the Origin
header, this header must match the scheme and host of the connection URL.
In case of a mismatch, a 400 status code response is returned and the
connection is rejected.
- No restrictions are imposed on incoming requests that do not include the
Origin header.
If necessary, the cors_allowed_origins option can be used
to allow other origins. This argument can be set to a string to set a single
allowed origin, or to a list to allow multiple origins. A special value of
'*' can be used to instruct the server to allow all origins, but this
should be done with care, as this could make the server vulnerable to
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks.