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Advanced Techniques in Go Programming

A UNIX Domain Socket Client

Explore how to build a UNIX domain socket client in Go that connects to a server on the same machine. Learn to handle socket communication by sending and receiving data, managing graceful exits, and understand the performance benefits over TCP/IP. This lesson guides you through practical coding steps to establish and run a UNIX socket client effectively.

We'll cover the following...

This lesson shows a UNIX domain socket client implementation, which can be used to communicate with a domain socket server, such as the one developed in the previous lesson.

Coding example

The relevant code can be found in socketClient.go:

Go (1.19.0)
package main
import (
	"bufio"
	"fmt"
	"net"
	"os"
	"strings"
	"time"
)
func main() {
	if len(os.Args) == 1 {
		fmt.Println("Need socket path")
		return
	}
	socketPath := os.Args[1]
	c, err := net.Dial("unix", socketPath)
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Println(err)
		return
	}
	defer c.Close()
	for {
		reader := bufio.NewReader(os.Stdin)
		fmt.Print(">> ")
		text, _ := reader.ReadString('\n')
		_, err = c.Write([]byte(text))
		if err != nil {
			fmt.Println("Write:", err)
			break
		}
		buf := make([]byte, 256)
		n, err := c.Read(buf[:])
		if err != nil {
			fmt.Println(err, n)
			return
		}
		fmt.Print("Read: ", string(buf[0:n]))
		if strings.TrimSpace(string(text)) == "STOP" {
			fmt.Println("Exiting UNIX domain socket client!")
			return
		}
		time.Sleep(5 * time.Second)
	}
}

From lines 1–17, is the part where we get from the user the socket file that is going to be used—the ...