How to access Unix Domain Sockets from the command line?

curl, linux, unix, unix-socket

Solution

You can use `ncat` command from the `nmap` project:

ncat -U /tmp/tbsocket1

To make it easy to access, you can do this:

# forward incoming 8080/tcp to unix socket
ncat -vlk 8080 -c 'ncat -U /tmp/tbsocket1'
# make a http request via curl
curl http://localhost:8080

You can also use `socat`:

# forward incoming 8080/tcp to unix socket
socat -d -d TCP-LISTEN:8080,fork UNIX:/tmp/tbsocket1

Problem

Reading a Unix Domain Socket file using Python is similar to an ordinary TCP socket: ``` >>> import socket >>> import sys >>> >>> server_address = '/tmp/tbsocket1' # Analogous to TCP (address, port) pair >>> sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_UNIX, socket.SOCK_STREAM) >>> sock.connect(server_address) >>> sock.recv(512) '*** uWSGI Python tracebacker output ***\n\n' ``` Since UDS are not ordinary files, `cat` does not work on them: ``` $ sudo cat /tmp/tbsocket1 cat: /tmp/tbsocket1: No such device or address ``` Neither do `curl`: ``` $ sudo curl /tmp/tbsocket1 curl: (3) <url> malformed ``` How do I read or write to Unix Domain Sockets using standard command line tools like curl? PS: In a strange coincidence, a curl patch was suggested very recently)

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