Extend urrlib http connection with local unix socket
By default Python urllib library don’t support connection via local unix socket, because http.client library, which is used by urllib set IPPROTO_TCP socket type.
In this blog post I will explain how to use local unix socket for your urllib connection.
Why would we need it? In situation you connect to remote host via Ansible using SSH, and later using authenticated sockets. So it’s a way of using secure connection via SSH and not exposing the password via HTTP. The reason we had to use it, was for suds SOAP client for SAP management. SAP administrators are not used to use passwords for SOAP, but are rather used to SSH to SAP machine and execute the specific command, which is levaraing the local unix socket.
Extending the urllib
urllib has handler mechanism. You can write custom handler to handle the connections. We will create the custom handler which will use the local unix socket instead of the TCP socket.
Urllib handler
import http.client
import socket
import urllib.request
class LocalHttpConnection(http.client.HTTPConnection):
def __init__(self, host, port=None, timeout=socket._GLOBAL_DEFAULT_TIMEOUT,
source_address=None, socketpath=None):
super().__init__(host, port, timeout, source_address)
self.sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_UNIX, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
self.sock.connect(socketpath)
class ExtendedHandler(urllib.request.HTTPHandler):
def __init__(self, debuglevel=0, socketpath=None):
self._debuglevel = debuglevel
self._socketpath = socketpath
def http_open(self, req):
return self.do_open(LocalHttpConnection, req, self._socketpath)
suds client
The suds client is a simple SOAP client. The suds client support custom transport method. To use our custom handler in the suds client, just pass the our handler in the suds contructor.