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Transports

Purpose

A transport defines the interface to interact with a socket.

Transports can be used for connecting, listening and accepting connections, but also for receiving and sending data. Both passive and active mode are supported, although all sockets are initialized as passive.

TCP transport

The TCP transport is a thin wrapper around gen_tcp.

SSL transport

The SSL transport is a thin wrapper around ssl. It requires the crypto, public_key and ssl applications to be started. You can start each of them individually, or you can call the ssl:start/0 convenience function.

ssl:start().

In a proper OTP setting, you will need to make your application depend on the crypto, public_key and ssl applications. They will be started automatically when starting your release.

The SSL transport accept/2 function performs both transport and SSL accepts. Errors occurring during the SSL accept phase are returned as {error, {ssl_accept, atom()}} to differentiate on which socket the problem occurred.

Sending and receiving data

This section assumes that Transport is a valid transport handler (like ranch_tcp or ranch_ssl) and Socket is a connected socket obtained through the listener.

You can send data to a socket by calling the Transport:send/2 function. The data can be given as iodata(), which is defined as binary() | iolist(). All the following calls will work:

Transport:send(Socket, <<"Ranch is cool!">>).
Transport:send(Socket, "Ranch is cool!").
Transport:send(Socket, ["Ranch", ["is", "cool!"]]).
Transport:send(Socket, ["Ranch", [<<"is">>, "cool!"]]).

You can receive data either in passive or in active mode. Passive mode means that you will perform a blocking Transport:recv/2 call, while active mode means that you will receive the data as a message.

By default, all data will be received as binary. It is possible to receive data as strings, although this is not recommended as binaries are a more efficient construct, especially for binary protocols.

Receiving data using passive mode requires a single function call. The first argument is the socket, and the third argument is a timeout duration before the call returns with {error, timeout}.

The second argument is the amount of data in bytes that we want to receive. The function will wait for data until it has received exactly this amount. If you are not expecting a precise size, you can specify 0 which will make this call return as soon as data was read, regardless of its size.

{ok, Data} = Transport:recv(Socket, 0, 5000).

Active mode requires you to inform the socket that you want to receive data as a message and to write the code to actually receive it.

There are two kinds of active modes: {active, once} and {active, true}. The first will send a single message before going back to passive mode; the second will send messages indefinitely. We recommend not using the {active, true} mode as it could quickly flood your process mailbox. It's better to keep the data in the socket and read it only when required.

Three different messages can be received:

  • {OK, Socket, Data}
  • {Closed, Socket}
  • {Error, Socket, Reason}

The value of OK, Closed and Error can be different depending on the transport being used. To be able to properly match on them you must first call the Transport:messages/0 function.

{OK, Closed, Error} = Transport:messages().

To start receiving messages you will need to call the Transport:setopts/2 function, and do so every time you want to receive data.

{OK, Closed, Error} = Transport:messages(),
Transport:setopts(Socket, [{active, once}]),
receive
    {OK, Socket, Data} ->
        io:format("data received: ~p~n", [Data]);
    {Closed, Socket} ->
        io:format("socket got closed!~n");
    {Error, Socket, Reason} ->
        io:format("error happened: ~p~n", [Reason])
end.

You can easily integrate active sockets with existing Erlang code as all you really need is just a few more clauses when receiving messages.

Writing a transport handler

A transport handler is a module implementing the ranch_transport behavior. It defines a certain number of callbacks that must be written in order to allow transparent usage of the transport handler.

The behavior doesn't define the socket options available when opening a socket. These do not need to be common to all transports as it's easy enough to write different initialization functions for the different transports that will be used. With one exception though. The setopts/2 function must implement the {active, once} and the {active, true} options.