LuaSocket: Network support for the Lua language
Description: The LuaSocket Homepage
Keywords: Lua, LuaSocket, Network, Library, Support, Internet

Network support for the Lua language

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## What is LuaSocket?

LuaSocket is a Lua extension library that is composed by two parts: a C core that provides support for the TCP and UDP transport layers, and a set of Lua modules that add support for functionality commonly needed by applications that deal with the Internet.

The core support has been implemented so that it is both efficient and simple to use. It is available to any Lua application once it has been properly initialized by the interpreter in use. The code has been tested and runs well on several Windows and Unix platforms.

Among the support modules, the most commonly used implement the SMTP (sending e-mails), HTTP (WWW access) and FTP (uploading and downloading files) client protocols. These provide a very natural and generic interface to the functionality defined by each protocol. In addition, you will find that the MIME (common encodings), URL (anything you could possible want to do with one) and LTN12 (filters, sinks, sources and pumps) modules can be very handy.

The library is available under the same terms and conditions as the Lua language, the MIT license. The idea is that if you can use Lua in a project, you should also be able to use LuaSocket.

Copyright © 2004-2005 Diego Nehab. All rights reserved.
Author: Diego Nehab

## Download

LuaSocket version 2.0 (final) is now available for download! It is compatible with Lua 5.0 and has been tested on Windows XP, Linux, and Mac OS X.

The library can be downloaded in source code from the LuaSocket project page at LuaForge. Besides the full C and Lua source code for the library, the distribution contains several examples, this user's manual and basic test procedures.

Danilo Tuler is maintaining Win32 binaries for LuaSocket, which are also available from LuaForge. These are compatible with the LuaBinaries available from LuaForge.

For those that want to give LuaSocket a quick try, download the stand-alone archive and unpack everything into a directory, say `c:\luasocket`. Then set `LUA_INIT` to load the `compat-5.1.lua` and set `LUA_PATH` and `LUA_CPATH` to look for files in the current directory:

    c:\luasocket\> set LUA_INIT=@c:\luasocket\compat-5.1.lua
    c:\luasocket\> set LUA_CPATH=?.dll
    c:\luasocket\> set LUA_PATH=?.lua

From that directory, you can then run the interpreter and it should find all files it needs. To download this manual page from the Internet, for example, do the following:

    c:\luasocket\> lua50
    Lua 5.0.2  Copyright (C) 1994-2004 Tecgraf, PUC-Rio
    > http = require"socket.http"
    > print(http.request"http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~diego/professional/luasocket/")
    --> the source to this web page gets dumped to terminal

When you are done playing, take a look at the installation section of the manual to find out how to properly install the library.

## Special thanks

Throughout LuaSocket's history, many people gave suggestions that helped improve it. For that, I thank the Lua community. Special thanks go to David Burgess, who has helped push the library to a new level of quality and from whom I have learned a lot of stuff that doesn't show up in RFCs. Special thanks also to Carlos Cassino, who played a big part in the extensible design seen in the C core of LuaSocket 2.0. Recently, Mike Pall has been helping a lot too! Thanks to you all!

## What's New

There is no big change for the 2.0 (final) release. It is basically a bug fix release. The only improvement is in the non-blocking support.

- New: sample module `dispatch.lua` implements a coroutine based dispatcher;
- New: sample `check-links.lua` works both in blocking and non-blocking mode using coroutines (using the new dispatcher);
- New: sample `forward.lua` implements a coroutine based forward server (using the new dispatcher);
- Improved: `tcp:send(data, i, j)` to return `(i+sent-1)`. This is great for non-blocking I/O, but might break some code;
- Improved: HTTP, SMTP, and FTP functions to accept a new field `create` that overrides the function used to create socket objects;
- Improved: `smtp.message` now supports multipart/alternative (for the HTML messages we all love so much);
- Fixed: `smtp.send` was hanging on errors returned by LTN12 sources;
- Fixed: `url.absolute()` to work when `base_url` is in parsed form;
- Fixed: `http.request()` not to redirect when the location header is empty (naughty servers...);
- Fixed: `tcp{client}:shutdown()` to check for class instead of group;
- Fixed: The manual to stop using `socket.try()` in place of `assert()`, since it can't;
- Improved: Got rid of `package.loaded.base = _G` kludge;
- Fixed: Parts of the manual referred to `require("http")` instead of `require("socket.http")`;
- Improved: Socket and MIME binaries are called 'core' each inside their directory (ex. "socket/core.dll"). The 'l' prefix was just a bad idea;
- Improved: Using bundles in Mac OS X, instead of dylibs;
- Fixed: `luasocket.h` to export `luaopen_socket_core`;
- Fixed: `udp:setpeername()` so you can "disconnect" an `UDP` socket;
- Fixed: A weird bug in HTTP support that caused some requests to fail (Florian Berger);
- Fixed: Bug in `socket.select()` that caused sockets with descriptor 0 to be ignored (Renato Maia);
- Fixed: "Bug" that caused `dns.toip()` to crash under uLinux (William Trenker);
- Fixed: "Bug" that caused `gethostbyname` to crash under VMS (Renato Maia);
- Fixed: `tcp:send("")` to return 0 bytes sent (Alexander Marinov);
- Improved: `socket.DEBUG` and `socket.VERSION` became `socket._DEBUGs` and `socket._VERSION` for uniformity with other libraries;
- Improved: `socket.select` now works on empty sets on Windows.

### Incompatibilities with previous versions

- If you use the return value of `tcp:send()` and you use the extra parameters to select only part of the string to be sent, your code is now broken, but when you fix it, it will be much simpler;
- If you check `socket.DEBUG` or `socket.VERSION`, change it to `socket._DEBUG` or `socket._VERSION`.

## Old Versions

All previous versions of the LuaSocket library can be downloaded here. Although these versions are no longer supported, they are still available for those that have compatibility issues.