This is a sample chapter that doesn't make much sense after the first section intended to demonstrate reStructuredText for the Lua cookbook.

networking.rst

Networking with LuaSocket

Matthew Frazier <leafstormrush@gmail.com>

The most common library for networking in Lua is LuaSocket by Diego Nehab. In addition to low-level support for communicating directly through sockets, it also includes:

• HTTP client
• FTP client
• SMTP client
• Mail processing filters
• URL manipulating functions

LuaSocket is installable via LuaRocks, as explained in luarocks. Many distributions also provide LuaSocket packages.

Socket-Level Programming

To create a TCP socket¹ connected to a particular place, you can use socket.connect, like this:

require 'socket'
local sock = socket.connect("www.example.com", 80)

From there, you can send and receive on the socket object. :

sock:send("GET / HTTP/1.0\n\n")
local data = sock:recv()

Warning

Don't EVER actually try to handle HTTP like this! Use socket.http, which we will be covering soon!

You could also use socket.tcp("www.example.com", 80) and then connect it separately, but this is a shortcut.

Servers

Servers are cool! According to some guy we met:

Servers are the whole reason the Internet exists as we know it.

You can create servers by using socket.bind.

Here is a graph about servers.

Concurrency

Everyone is talking about concurrency these days!

Story

One day, there was this guy named why the lucky stiff. Unfortunately, before concurrency became popular, he disappeared and no one has heard from him sense. Which is too bad, because he probably would have come up with a good way to do concurrency no one had thought of before.

Some of the ways people have thought of for being concurrent are:

1. Multithreading.
2. Having multiple processes.
3. Asynchronous programming.

Fortunately, Lua has something cool you can use for number three: Coroutines! (If you don't know about coroutines, see using-coroutines for more info.)

Glossary

client

The program run by the user that talks to clients.

server

The program that clients talk to.

TCP

What most people use nowadays instead of UDP.

---

1. There's also UDP, but we're not covering it in this introduction.↩

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