Haskell Network Programming - UDP Client and Server

2017-06-12

Using the network package we can build a low level UDP server and client.

import Control.Concurrent        (forkIO, threadDelay)
import Control.Monad             (forever)
import qualified Data.ByteString.Char8 as C
import Network.Socket hiding     (recv)
import Network.Socket.ByteString (recv, sendAll)

runUDPServer :: IO ()
runUDPServer = do 
  addrinfos <- getAddrInfo Nothing (Just "127.0.0.1") (Just "7000")
  let serveraddr = head addrinfos

It is important to remember to use Datagram to receive data via UDP. Then we can bind the socket to the address and wait to receive data.

  sock <- socket (addrFamily serveraddr) Datagram defaultProtocol
  bind sock (addrAddress serveraddr)
  print "UDP server is waiting..."
  recv sock 4096 >>= \message -> print ("UDP server received: " ++ (C.unpack message))
  print "UDP server socket is closing now."
  close sock

The client code is similar. We need to sned data via Datagram or the server will ignore it. Then we run sendAll with a ByteString and the server will receive the message.

sendMessage :: String -> IO ()
sendMessage s = do
  addrinfos <- getAddrInfo Nothing (Just "127.0.0.1") (Just "7000")
  let serveraddr = head addrinfos
  sock <- socket (addrFamily serveraddr) Datagram defaultProtocol
  connect sock (addrAddress serveraddr)
  sendAll sock $ C.pack s
  close sock

We run the server in a separate thread because recv is blocking. We add a few threadDelays to make sure that the server has started up and that the prints from different threads do not occur at the same time. Otherwise, the messages might print at the same time and be illegible.

main :: IO ()
main = do
  _ <- forkIO $ runUDPServer
  threadDelay 1000000 -- wait one second
  sendMessage "Hello, world!"
  threadDelay 1000000 -- wait one second

When main terminates all of the other threads in the program will terminate as well [2].

A real world UDP server will likely need to constantly receive requests. We can change the last line to use forever. It will repeatedly process incoming data.

runUDPServerForever :: IO ()
runUDPServerForever = do
  addrinfos <- getAddrInfo Nothing (Just "127.0.0.1") (Just "7000")
  let serveraddr = head addrinfos 
  sock <- socket (addrFamily serveraddr) Datagram defaultProtocol
  bind sock (addrAddress serveraddr)
  forever (do recv sock 4096 >>= print)

Haskell Network Programming - UDP Client and Server

References