Test servers

When developing client / server applications, it's often useful to be able to test each side on its own. It's even more useful when one of the two sides doesn't provide any log capability.

This article provides very simple test servers, aimed at helping client development.

Multithreaded TCP server

Our first server is a multithreaded TCP server, written in Python. Code is copied from here. It is only (very very) slightly modified, to ensure that it receives incoming connection requests on any local network interface.

Received data is echoed back to the client.

Beware: TCP is a stream-oriented protocol, not a message-oriented protocol. So the code below would not be acceptable in a production environment. Anyway, for test purposes, there is no real problem

from socket import *
import thread

BUFF = 1024
HOST = '' 
#HOST = '127.0.0.1'# must be input parameter @TODO
PORT = 7714 # must be input parameter @TODO
def response(key):
    return 'Server response: ' + key

def handler(clientsock,addr):
    while 1:
        data = clientsock.recv(BUFF)
        if not data: break
        print repr(addr) + ' recv:' + repr(data)
        clientsock.send(response(data))
        print repr(addr) + ' sent:' + repr(response(data))
        if "close" == data.rstrip(): break # type 'close' on client console to close connection from the server side

    clientsock.close()
    print addr, "- closed connection" #log on console

if __name__=='__main__':
    ADDR = (HOST, PORT)
    serversock = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM)
    serversock.setsockopt(SOL_SOCKET, SO_REUSEADDR, 1)
    serversock.bind(ADDR)
    serversock.listen(5)
    while 1:
        print 'waiting for connection... listening on port', PORT
        clientsock, addr = serversock.accept()
        print '...connected from:', addr
        thread.start_new_thread(handler, (clientsock, addr))

Web service server

Our second server implements a very simple web service returning information in JSON format, again in Python. Code is adapted from this one. Starting from a fresh Linux Mint 17.3 virtual machine, here is what I did to run this server:

• using Synaptic package manager, install python-pip and python-virtualenv
• install Flask:

virtualenv flask
flask/bin/pip install flask

• create app.py file with following contents:

#!flask/bin/python
from flask import Flask, jsonify, abort, make_response

app = Flask(__name__)

users = [
    {
        'id': 1,
        'name': 'Rocky',
        'age': 38 
    },
    {
        'id': 2,
        'name': 'Steve',
        'age': 50
    },
    {
        'id': 3,
        'name': 'Melinda',
        'age': 38
    }
]

@app.route('/users', methods=['GET'])
def get_users():
    return jsonify({'users': users})

@app.route('/users/<int:user_id>', methods=['GET'])
def get_user(user_id):
    user = [user for user in users if user['id'] == user_id]
    if len(user) == 0:
        abort(404)
    return jsonify({'user': user[0]})

@app.errorhandler(404)
def not_found(error):
    return make_response(jsonify({'error': 'Not found'}), 404)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(debug=True)

• run the file:

chmod u+x app.py
./app.py

• the server can be reached at http://localhost:5000.

UDP echo server

I had to develop a system where a client application had to send messages to a remote server application, on a predefined port (20000), and wait for answers received on a predefined local port (20001). All messages were sent over UDP. On Linux, socat allows to set up an echo test server in a very simple way:

socat -v UDP4-RECVFROM:20000,fork UDP4-SENDTO:<clienthost>:20001

The -v option displays received messages.

TCP echo server

socat - TCP-LISTEN:<port>,crlf

A simple HTTP server for POST requests

For on of the projects I'm working on, I need to receive binary files sent by a POST requests. Here is a simple Python program that does this.