ipc-util

Provides simple cross-platform generic IPC message passing built on top of the interprocess crate.

Installation

Add this to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
ipc_util = "0.1"

Usage

There are three functions that can be used to send messages to an IPC server as a client:

• The send_ipc_message function connects to the socket and sends an arbitrary serializable object over it.
• The send_ipc_query function connects to the socket, sends an arbitrary serializable object, and reads an arbitrary deserializable object in response.

There are two functions that can be used to spawn an IPC server thread:

• The start_ipc_listener function is used to spawn an IPC server thread using a callback that is passed a LocalSocketStream directly, as can be seen in the stream example.
• The start_ipc_server function is a wrapper around start_ipc_listener, where the callback instead receives an arbitrary serializable object TRequest and returns an Option<TResponse>. When a response is returned, it is sent back to the client. This can be seen in the server example.

It's recommended to use start_ipc_server and its connection callback's Option return type, where returning a Some variant matches up with a send_ipc_query call from the client, and returning None matches up with send_ipc_message.

Example

use interprocess::local_socket::NameTypeSupport;
use ipc_util::{send_ipc_message, send_ipc_query, start_ipc_server};
use serde::{Deserialize, Serialize};

pub const MY_SOCKET_PATH: &str = "/tmp/ipc-util-ex-server.sock";
pub const MY_SOCKET_NAMESPACE: &str = "@ipc-util-ex-server.sock";

pub fn get_ipc_name() -> &'static str {
    use NameTypeSupport::*;
    match NameTypeSupport::query() {
        OnlyPaths => MY_SOCKET_PATH,
        OnlyNamespaced | Both => MY_SOCKET_NAMESPACE,
    }
}

#[derive(Debug, Serialize, Deserialize)]
pub enum Message {
    Text { text: String },
    Ping,
    Pong,
}

fn run_server() {
    start_ipc_server(
        get_ipc_name(),
        |message: Message| match message {
            Message::Text { text } => {
                println!("{text}");
                None
            }
            Message::Ping => Some(Message::Pong),
            _ => None,
        },
        Some(|e| panic!("Incoming connection error: {e}")),
    )
    .expect("Failed to start ipc listener")
    .join()
    .expect("Failed to join server thread");
}

fn run_client() {
    let text = Message::Text {
        text: "Hello from client!".to_string(),
    };

    let ping = Message::Ping;

    send_ipc_message(get_ipc_name(), &text).expect("Failed to connect to socket");

    let response: Message =
        send_ipc_query(get_ipc_name(), &ping).expect("Failed to connect to socket");

    dbg!(response);
}

fn main() {
    let args = std::env::args().collect::<Vec<_>>();

    match args.get(1).map(|s| s.as_str()) {
        Some("server") => run_server(),
        Some("client") => run_client(),
        _ => {
            println!("Usage: {} [server|client]", args[0]);
            std::process::exit(1);
        }
    }
}

You can run the examples with cargo run --example server server and cargo run --example server client.