Transports

A transport defines the interface to interact with a socket.

Transports can be used for connecting, listening and accepting connections, but also for receiving and sending data. Both passive and active mode are supported, although all sockets are initialized as passive.

TCP transport

The TCP transport is a thin wrapper around gen_tcp.

SSL transport

The SSL transport is a thin wrapper around ssl.

Ranch depends on ssl by default so any necessary dependencies will start when Ranch is started. It is possible to remove the dependency when the SSL transport will not be used. Refer to your release build tool's documentation for more information.

When embedding Ranch listeners that have an SSL transport, your application must depend on the ssl application for proper behavior.

Sending and receiving data

This section assumes that Transport is a valid transport handler (like ranch_tcp or ranch_ssl) and Socket is a connected socket obtained through the listener.

You can send data to a socket by calling the Transport:send/2 function. The data can be given as iodata(), which is defined as binary() | iolist(). All the following calls will work:

Transport:send(Socket, <<"Ranch is cool!">>).
Transport:send(Socket, "Ranch is cool!").
Transport:send(Socket, ["Ranch", ["is", "cool!"]]).
Transport:send(Socket, ["Ranch", [<<"is">>, "cool!"]]).

You can receive data either in passive or in active mode. Passive mode means that you will perform a blocking Transport:recv/3 call, while active mode means that you will receive the data as a message.

By default, all data will be received as binary. It is possible to receive data as strings, although this is not recommended as binaries are a more efficient construct, especially for binary protocols.

Receiving data using passive mode requires a single function call. The first argument is the socket, and the third argument is a timeout duration before the call returns with {error, timeout}.

The second argument is the amount of data in bytes that we want to receive. The function will wait for data until it has received exactly this amount. If you are not expecting a precise size, you can specify 0 which will make this call return as soon as data was read, regardless of its size.

{ok, Data} = Transport:recv(Socket, 0, 5000).

Active mode requires you to inform the socket that you want to receive data as a message and to write the code to actually receive it.

There are two kinds of active modes: {active, once} and {active, true}. The first will send a single message before going back to passive mode; the second will send messages indefinitely. We recommend not using the {active, true} mode as it could quickly flood your process mailbox. It's better to keep the data in the socket and read it only when required.

Three different messages can be received:

• {OK, Socket, Data}
• {Closed, Socket}
• {Error, Socket, Reason}

The value of OK, Closed and Error can be different depending on the transport being used. To be able to properly match on them you must first call the Transport:messages/0 function.

{OK, Closed, Error} = Transport:messages().

To start receiving messages you will need to call the Transport:setopts/2 function, and do so every time you want to receive data.

{OK, Closed, Error} = Transport:messages(),
Transport:setopts(Socket, [{active, once}]),
receive
	{OK, Socket, Data} ->
		io:format("data received: ~p~n", [Data]);
	{Closed, Socket} ->
		io:format("socket got closed!~n");
	{Error, Socket, Reason} ->
		io:format("error happened: ~p~n", [Reason])
end.

You can easily integrate active sockets with existing Erlang code as all you really need is just a few more clauses when receiving messages.

Sending files

As in the previous section it is assumed Transport is a valid transport handler and Socket is a connected socket obtained through the listener.

To send a whole file, with name Filename, over a socket:

{ok, SentBytes} = Transport:sendfile(Socket, Filename).

Or part of a file, with Offset greater than or equal to 0, Bytes number of bytes and chunks of size ChunkSize:

Opts = [{chunk_size, ChunkSize}],
{ok, SentBytes} = Transport:sendfile(Socket, Filename, Offset, Bytes, Opts).

To improve efficiency when sending multiple parts of the same file it is also possible to use a file descriptor opened in raw mode:

{ok, RawFile} = file:open(Filename, [raw, read, binary]),
{ok, SentBytes} = Transport:sendfile(Socket, RawFile, Offset, Bytes, Opts).

Upgrading a TCP socket to SSL

A connected TCP socket can be upgraded to a SSL socket via the function ranch_ssl:handshake/3. The socket must be in {active, false} mode before telling the client that the server is ready to upgrade in order to avoid race conditions.

{ok, NewSocket} = ranch_ssl:handshake(Socket, SslOpts, 5000).

Writing a transport handler

A transport handler is a module implementing the ranch_transport behavior. It defines a certain number of callbacks that must be written in order to allow transparent usage of the transport handler.

The behavior doesn't define the socket options available when opening a socket. These do not need to be common to all transports as it's easy enough to write different initialization functions for the different transports that will be used. With one exception though. The setopts/2 function must implement the {active, once} and the {active, true} options.

If the transport handler doesn't have a native implementation of sendfile/5 a fallback is available, ranch_transport:sendfile/6. The extra first argument is the transport's module. See ranch_ssl for an example.