SOCKETIO(1)

NAME
socketio - socketio Documentation

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This project implements a Socket.IO server that can run standalone or integrated with a Python WSGI application. The following are some of its features:

•   Fully compatible with the Javascript, Swift, C++ and Java official Socket.IO clients, plus any third party clients that comply with the Socket.IO specification.

•   Compatible with Python 2.7 and Python 3.3+.

•   Supports large number of clients even on modest hardware when used with an asynchronous server based on eventlet or gevent. For development and testing, any WSGI complaint multi-threaded server can be used.

•   Includes a WSGI middleware that integrates Socket.IO traffic with standard WSGI applications.

•   Broadcasting of messages to all connected clients, or to subsets of them assigned to "rooms".

•   Optional support for multiple servers, connected through a messaging queue such as Redis or RabbitMQ.

•   Send messages to clients from external processes, such as Celery workers or auxiliary scripts.

•   Event-based architecture implemented with decorators that hides the details of the protocol.

•   Support for HTTP long-polling and WebSocket transports.

•   Support for XHR2 and XHR browsers.

•   Support for text and binary messages.

•   Support for gzip and deflate HTTP compression.

•   Configurable CORS responses, to avoid cross-origin problems with browsers.

WHAT IS SOCKET.IO?

Socket.IO is a transport protocol that enables real-time bidirectional event-based communication between clients (typically web browsers) and a server. The original implementations of the client and server components are written in JavaScript.

GETTING STARTED

The Socket.IO server can be installed with pip:

pip install python-socketio

The following is a basic example of a Socket.IO server that uses Flask to deploy the client code to the browser:

import socketio
import eventlet
from flask import Flask, render_template
sio = socketio.Server()
app = Flask(__name__)
@app.route('/')
def index():
    """Serve the client-side application."""
    return render_template('index.html')
@sio.on('connect')
def connect(sid, environ):
    print('connect ', sid)
@sio.on('my message')
def message(sid, data):
    print('message ', data)
@sio.on('disconnect')
def disconnect(sid):
    print('disconnect ', sid)
if __name__ == '__main__':
    # wrap Flask application with socketio's middleware
    app = socketio.Middleware(sio, app)
    # deploy as an eventlet WSGI server
    eventlet.wsgi.server(eventlet.listen(('', 8000)), app)

The client-side application must include the socket.io-client library (versions 1.3.5 or newer recommended).

Each time a client connects to the server the connect event handler is invoked with the sid (session ID) assigned to the connection and the WSGI environment dictionary. The server can inspect authentication or other headers to decide if the client is allowed to connect. To reject a client the handler must return False.

When the client sends an event to the server the appropriate event handler is invoked with the sid and the message. The application can define as many events as needed and associate them with event handlers. An event is defined simply by a name.

When a connection with a client is broken, the disconnect event is called, allowing the application to perform cleanup.

ROOMS

Because Socket.IO is a bidirectional protocol, the server can send messages to any connected client at any time. To make it easy to address groups of clients, the application can put clients into rooms, and then address messages to the entire room.

When clients first connect, they are assigned to their own rooms, named with the session ID (the sid argument passed to all event handlers). The application is 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. The individual rooms assigned to clients when they connect are not special in any way, the application is free to add or remove clients from them, though once it does that it will lose the ability to address individual clients.

@sio.on('enter room')
def enter_room(sid, data):
    sio.enter_room(sid, data['room'])
@sio.on('enter room')
def leave_room(sid, data):
    sio.leave_room(sid, data['room'])

The socketio.Server.emit() method takes an event name, a message payload of type str, bytes, list or dict, and the recipient room. To address an individual client, the sid of that client should be given as room (assuming the application did not alter these initial rooms). To address all connected clients, the room argument should be omitted.

@sio.on('my message')
def message(sid, data):
    print('message ', data)
    sio.emit('my reply', data, room='my room')

Often when broadcasting a message to group of users in a room, it is desirable that the sender does not receive its own message. The socketio.Server.emit() method provides an optional skip_sid argument to specify a client that should be skipped during the broadcast.

@sio.on('my message')
def message(sid, data):
    print('message ', data)
    sio.emit('my reply', data, room='my room', skip_sid=sid)

RESPONSES

When a client sends an event to the server, it can optionally provide a callback function, to be invoked with a response provided by the server. The server can provide a response simply by returning it from the corresponding event handler.

@sio.on('my event', namespace='/chat')
def my_event_handler(sid, data):
    # handle the message
    return "OK", 123

The event handler can return a single value, or a tuple with several values. The callback function on the client side will be invoked with these returned values as arguments.

CALLBACKS

The server can also request a response to an event sent to a client. The socketio.Server.emit() method has an optional callback argument that can be set to a callable. When this argument is given, the callable will be invoked with the arguments returned by the client as a response.

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.

NAMESPACES

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 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.

When the namespace argument is omitted, set to None or to '/', the default namespace, representing the physical connection, is used.

USING A MESSAGE QUEUE

The Socket.IO server owns the socket connections to all the clients, so it is the only process that can emit events to them. Unfortunately this becomes a limitation for many applications that use more than one process. A common need is to emit events to clients from a process other than the server, for example a Celery worker.

To enable these auxiliary processes to emit events, the server can be configured to listen for externally issued events on a message queue such as Redis or RabbitMQ. Processes that need to emit events to client then post these events to the queue.

Another situation in which the use of a message queue is necessary is with high traffic applications that work with large number of clients. To support these clients, it may be necessary to horizontally scale the Socket.IO server by splitting the client list among multiple server processes. In this type of installation, each server processes owns the connections to a subset of the clients. To make broadcasting work in this environment, the servers communicate with each other through the message queue.

The message queue service needs to be installed and configured separately. One of the options offered by this package is to use Kombu to access the message queue, which means that any message queue supported by this package can be used. Kombu can be installed with pip:

pip install kombu

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, Kombu needs the Python package for Redis installed as well:

pip install redis

To configure a Socket.IO server to connect to a message queue, the client_manager argument must be passed in the server creation. The following example instructs the server to connect to a Redis service running on the same host and on the default port:

mgr = socketio.KombuManager('redis://')
sio = socketio.Server(client_manager=mgr)

For a RabbitMQ queue also running on the local server with default credentials, the configuration is as follows:

mgr = socketio.KombuManager('amqp://')
sio = socketio.Server(client_manager=mgr)

The 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 connect to the message queue appropriately.

If the use of Kombu is not desired, native Redis support is also offered through the RedisManager class. This class takes the same arguments as KombuManager, but connects directly to a Redis store using the queue's pub/sub functionality:

mgr = socketio.RedisManager('redis://')
sio = socketio.Server(client_manager=mgr)

If multiple Sokcet.IO servers are connected to a message queue, they automatically communicate with each other and manage a combined client list, without any need for additional configuration. To have a process other than a server connect to the queue to emit a message, the same KombuManager and RedisManager classes can be used as standalone object. In this case, the write_only argument should be set to True to disable the creation of a listening thread. For example:

# connect to the redis queue through Kombu
redis = socketio.KombuManager('redis://', write_only=True)
# emit an event
redis.emit('my event', data={'foo': 'bar'}, room='my room')

DEPLOYMENT

The following sections describe a variety of deployment strategies for Socket.IO servers.

  Eventlet

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.Middleware:

app = socketio.Middleware(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

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.Middleware:

app = socketio.Middleware(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.Middleware(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.

  Standard Threading Library

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.Middleware(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.

  Multi-process deployments

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, either by using eventlet, gevent, or standard threads. Worker processes that 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 communicate with each other through a message queue, which must be installed and configured. See the section on using message queues above for instructions.

API REFERENCE

class socketio.Middleware(socketio_app, wsgi_app=None, socketio_path='socket.io')
    WSGI middleware for Socket.IO.

    This middleware dispatches traffic to a Socket.IO application, and optionally forwards regular HTTP traffic to a WSGI application.

Parameters

•   socketio_app -- The Socket.IO server.

•   wsgi_app -- The WSGI app that receives all other traffic.

•   socketio_path -- The endpoint where the Socket.IO application should be installed. The default value is appropriate for most cases.

    Example usage:

    import socketio
    import eventlet
    from . import wsgi_app
    sio = socketio.Server()
    app = socketio.Middleware(sio, wsgi_app)
    eventlet.wsgi.server(eventlet.listen(('', 8000)), app)

class socketio.Server(client_manager=None, logger=False, binary=False, json=None, **kwargs)
    A Socket.IO server.

    This class implements a fully compliant Socket.IO web server with support for websocket and long-polling transports.

Parameters

•   client_manager -- The client manager instance that will manage the client list. When this is omitted, the client list is stored in an in-memory structure, so the use of multiple connected servers is not possible.

•   logger -- To enable logging set to True or pass a logger object to use. To disable logging set to False.

•   binary -- True to support binary payloads, False to treat all payloads as text. On Python 2, if this is set to True, unicode values are treated as text, and str and bytes values are treated as binary. This option has no effect on Python 3, where text and binary payloads are always automatically discovered.

•   json -- An alternative json module to use for encoding and decoding packets. Custom json modules must have dumps and loads functions that are compatible with the standard library versions.

•   kwargs -- Connection parameters for the underlying Engine.IO server.

    The Engine.IO configuration supports the following settings:

Parameters

•   async_mode -- The library used for asynchronous operations. Valid options are "threading", "eventlet" and "gevent". If this argument is not given, "eventlet" is tried first, then "gevent", and finally "threading". The websocket transport is only supported in "eventlet" mode.

•   ping_timeout -- The time in seconds that the client waits for the server to respond before disconnecting.

•   ping_interval -- The interval in seconds at which the client pings the server.

•   max_http_buffer_size -- The maximum size of a message when using the polling transport.

•   allow_upgrades -- Whether to allow transport upgrades or not.

•   http_compression -- Whether to compress packages when using the polling transport.

•   compression_threshold -- Only compress messages when their byte size is greater than this value.

•   cookie -- Name of the HTTP cookie that contains the client session id. If set to None, a cookie is not sent to the client.

•   cors_allowed_origins -- List of origins that are allowed to connect to this server. All origins are allowed by default.

•   cors_credentials -- Whether credentials (cookies, authentication) are allowed in requests to this server.

•   engineio_logger -- To enable Engine.IO logging set to True or pass a logger object to use. To disable logging set to False.

close_room(room, namespace=None)
    Close a room.

    This function removes all the clients from the given room.

Parameters

•   room -- Room name.

•   namespace -- The Socket.IO namespace for the event. If this argument is omitted the default namespace is used.

disconnect(sid, namespace=None)
    Disconnect a client.

Parameters

•   sid -- Session ID of the client.

•   namespace -- The Socket.IO namespace to disconnect. If this argument is omitted the default namespace is used.

emit(event, data=None, room=None, skip_sid=None, namespace=None, callback=None)
    Emit a custom event to one or more connected clients.

Parameters

•   event -- The event name. It can be any string. The event names 'connect', 'message' and 'disconnect' are reserved and should not be used.

•   data -- The data to send to the client or clients. Data can be of type str, bytes, list or dict. If a list or dict, the data will be serialized as JSON.

•   room -- The recipient of the message. This can be set to the session ID of a client to address that client's room, or to any custom room created by the application, If this argument is omitted the event is broadcasted to all connected clients.

•   skip_sid -- The session ID of a client to skip when broadcasting to a room or to all clients. This can be used to prevent a message from being sent to the sender.

•   namespace -- The Socket.IO namespace for the event. If this argument is omitted the event is emitted to the default namespace.

•   callback -- If given, this function will be called to acknowledge the the client has received the message. The arguments that will be passed to the function are those provided by the client. Callback functions can only be used when addressing an individual client.

enter_room(sid, room, namespace=None)
    Enter a room.

    This function adds the client to a room. The emit() and send() functions can optionally broadcast events to all the clients in a room.

Parameters

•   sid -- Session ID of the client.

•   room -- Room name. If the room does not exist it is created.

•   namespace -- The Socket.IO namespace for the event. If this argument is omitted the default namespace is used.

handle_request(environ, start_response)
    Handle an HTTP request from the client.

    This is the entry point of the Socket.IO application, using the same interface as a WSGI application. For the typical usage, this function is invoked by the Middleware instance, but it can be invoked directly when the middleware is not used.

Parameters

•   environ -- The WSGI environment.

•   start_response -- The WSGI start_response function.

    This function returns the HTTP response body to deliver to the client as a byte sequence.

leave_room(sid, room, namespace=None)
    Leave a room.

    This function removes the client from a room.

Parameters

•   sid -- Session ID of the client.

•   room -- Room name.

•   namespace -- The Socket.IO namespace for the event. If this argument is omitted the default namespace is used.

on(event, handler=None, namespace=None)
    Register an event handler.

Parameters

•   event -- The event name. It can be any string. The event names 'connect', 'message' and 'disconnect' are reserved and should not be used.

•   handler -- The function that should be invoked to handle the event. When this parameter is not given, the method acts as a decorator for the handler function.

•   namespace -- The Socket.IO namespace for the event. If this argument is omitted the handler is associated with the default namespace.

    Example usage:

    # as a decorator:
    @socket_io.on('connect', namespace='/chat')
    def connect_handler(sid, environ):
        print('Connection request')
        if environ['REMOTE_ADDR'] in blacklisted:
            return False  # reject
    # as a method:
    def message_handler(sid, msg):
        print('Received message: ', msg)
        eio.send(sid, 'response')
    socket_io.on('message', namespace='/chat', message_handler)

    The handler function receives the sid (session ID) for the client as first argument. The 'connect' event handler receives the WSGI environment as a second argument, and can return False to reject the connection. The 'message' handler and handlers for custom event names receive the message payload as a second argument. Any values returned from a message handler will be passed to the client's acknowledgement callback function if it exists. The 'disconnect' handler does not take a second argument.

rooms(sid, namespace=None)
    Return the rooms a client is in.

Parameters

•   sid -- Session ID of the client.

•   namespace -- The Socket.IO namespace for the event. If this argument is omitted the default namespace is used.

send(data, room=None, skip_sid=None, namespace=None, callback=None)
    Send a message to one or more connected clients.

    This function emits an event with the name 'message'. Use emit() to issue custom event names.

Parameters

•   data -- The data to send to the client or clients. Data can be of type str, bytes, list or dict. If a list or dict, the data will be serialized as JSON.

•   room -- The recipient of the message. This can be set to the session ID of a client to address that client's room, or to any custom room created by the application, If this argument is omitted the event is broadcasted to all connected clients.

•   skip_sid -- The session ID of a client to skip when broadcasting to a room or to all clients. This can be used to prevent a message from being sent to the sender.

•   namespace -- The Socket.IO namespace for the event. If this argument is omitted the event is emitted to the default namespace.

•   callback -- If given, this function will be called to acknowledge the the client has received the message. The arguments that will be passed to the function are those provided by the client. Callback functions can only be used when addressing an individual client.

transport(sid)
    Return the name of the transport used by the client.

    The two possible values returned by this function are 'polling' and 'websocket'.

Parameters
    sid -- The session of the client.

class socketio.BaseManager
    Manage client connections.

    This class keeps track of all the clients and the rooms they are in, to support the broadcasting of messages. The data used by this class is stored in a memory structure, making it appropriate only for single process services. More sophisticated storage backends can be implemented by subclasses.

close_room(room, namespace)
    Remove all participants from a room.

connect(sid, namespace)
    Register a client connection to a namespace.

disconnect(sid, namespace)
    Register a client disconnect from a namespace.

emit(event, data, namespace, room=None, skip_sid=None, callback=None)
    Emit a message to a single client, a room, or all the clients connected to the namespace.

enter_room(sid, namespace, room)
    Add a client to a room.

get_namespaces()
    Return an iterable with the active namespace names.

get_participants(namespace, room)
    Return an iterable with the active participants in a room.

get_rooms(sid, namespace)
    Return the rooms a client is in.

leave_room(sid, namespace, room)
    Remove a client from a room.

trigger_callback(sid, namespace, id, data)
    Invoke an application callback.

class socketio.PubSubManager(channel='socketio', write_only=False)
    Manage a client list attached to a pub/sub backend.

    This is a base class that enables multiple servers to share the list of clients, with the servers communicating events through a pub/sub backend. The use of a pub/sub backend also allows any client connected to the backend to emit events addressed to Socket.IO clients.

    The actual backends must be implemented by subclasses, this class only provides a pub/sub generic framework.

Parameters
    channel -- The channel name on which the server sends and receives notifications.

emit(event, data, namespace=None, room=None, skip_sid=None, callback=None)
    Emit a message to a single client, a room, or all the clients connected to the namespace.

    This method takes care or propagating the message to all the servers that are connected through the message queue.

    The parameters are the same as in Server.emit().

class socketio.KombuManager(url='amqp://guest:guest@localhost:5672//', channel='socketio', write_only=False)
    Client manager that uses kombu for inter-process messaging.

    This class implements a client manager backend for event sharing across multiple processes, using RabbitMQ, Redis or any other messaging mechanism supported by kombu.

    To use a kombu backend, initialize the Server instance as follows:

    url = 'amqp://user:password@hostname:port//'
    server = socketio.Server(client_manager=socketio.KombuManager(url))

Parameters

•   url -- The connection URL for the backend messaging queue. Example connection URLs are 'amqp://guest:guest@localhost:5672//' and 'redis://localhost:6379/' for RabbitMQ and Redis respectively. Consult the kombu documentation for more on how to construct connection URLs.

•   channel -- The channel name on which the server sends and receives notifications. Must be the same in all the servers.

•   write_only -- If set ot True, only initialize to emit events. The default of False initializes the class for emitting and receiving.

class socketio.RedisManager(url='redis://localhost:6379/0', channel='socketio', write_only=False)
    Redis based client manager.

    This class implements a Redis backend for event sharing across multiple processes. Only kept here as one more example of how to build a custom backend, since the kombu backend is perfectly adequate to support a Redis message queue.

    To use a Redis backend, initialize the Server instance as follows:

    url = 'redis://hostname:port/0'
    server = socketio.Server(client_manager=socketio.RedisManager(url))

Parameters

•   url -- The connection URL for the Redis server. For a default Redis store running on the same host, use redis://.

•   channel -- The channel name on which the server sends and receives notifications. Must be the same in all the servers.

•   write_only -- If set ot True, only initialize to emit events. The default of False initializes the class for emitting and receiving.

AUTHOR
Miguel Grinberg

COPYRIGHT
2015, Miguel Grinberg