Ruby webserver without opened port

Hi all

I am looking for possibility to have ruby-based webserver communicating by pipe, not by TCP/IP. So I will send HTTP request by pipe and I want to read response by pipe. It should be used as bundled/internal webserver (RPC or something) for desktop application. I don't want to handle ports configuration when there will be more instances of my application running on same machine.

Any ideas?

Thank you in advance.

From stackoverflow

• Not an answer to your question. However, if you do end up having to use a TCP/IP HTTP Server, you should ensure that it's only listening on 127.0.0.1. Listening on the local host address should be quite fast, as it won't hit the network, and will also make it a tad more secure to stop people connecting from the outside.

• Pipe is for one-way communication, so there is no way you can set up webserver on that. You might try with unix socket. But really simplest solution is to use loopback (127.0.0.1). It's highly optimized, so the speed won't be a problem.

• Try a UNIXSocket You use a local path to specify where the socket connection is, not a port, and you can easily handle multiple simultaneous connections.

  # server.rb
  require 'socket'
  File.delete( filename ) if File.exists? filename
  server = UNIXServer.open( filename )
  server.listen( queuesize )
  
  puts "waiting on client connection"
  while client= server.accept
    puts "got client connection #{client.inspect}"
  
    child_pid = fork do 
      puts "Asking the client what they want"
      client.puts "Welcome to your server, what can I get for you?"
      until client.eof?
        line = client.gets
        puts "The client wants #{line.chomp.inspect}"
      end
      client.close
    end
  
    puts "running server (#{child_pid})"
    client.close
    Process.detach(child_pid)
  end
  
  server.close
  
  
  # client.rb
  require 'socket'
  puts "requesting server connection"
  server = UNIXSocket.new( filename )
  puts "got server connection #{server}"
  line = server.gets
  puts "The server said: #{line.chomp.inspect}"
  %w{ a-pony a-puppy a-kitten a-million-dollars }.each do |item|
    server.puts item
  end
  server.close
  

• Thin supports unix sockets.