Django TCP socket communication

Question

I am new to TCP socket programming. I have a django based server communicating with a microcontroller. Now, I want to implement TCP based socket on the server side in order to communicate with the TCP socket on the microcontroller. Can anyone give me an idea on how to do this ? What libraries should I use on my django server The microprocessor basically opens the socket every 5 seconds and sends a notification to the server. I on the server side should be able to read this and pump data back to the microprocessor using this socket which was opened by the microprocessor.

Answer 1

If you are already familiar with django, and your microcontroller supports sending HTTP (REST) requests and can parse Json , you can just add a regular django based view that returns json:

# views.py
from django.http import JsonResponse
def my_view(request):
    # handle input here, probably using request.GET / request.POST
    return JsonResponse({'status': 'OK'})

However, if your microcontroller is very simple and cannot do HTTP/json, you can use a simple SocketServer from python's standard library instead:

import SocketServer

class MyTCPHandler(SocketServer.BaseRequestHandler):

    def handle(self):
        self.data = self.request.recv(1024).strip()
        print "{} wrote:".format(self.client_address[0])
        print self.data
        # just send back the same data, but upper-cased
        self.request.sendall(self.data.upper())

if __name__ == "__main__":
    HOST, PORT = "localhost", 9999
    server = SocketServer.TCPServer((HOST, PORT), MyTCPHandler)
    server.serve_forever()

Keep in mind you can still import django's libraries and use django's ORM (DB) inside a SocketServer.

Another popular option is to use Tornado's tcpserver:

from tornado.ioloop import IOLoop
from tornado.tcpserver import TCPServer


class MyTCPServer(TCPServer):
    def handle_stream(self, stream, address):
        def got_data(data):
            print "Input: {}".format(repr(data))
            stream.write("OK", stream.close)

        stream.read_until("\n", got_data)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    server = MyTCPServer()
    server.listen(9876)
    IOLoop.instance().start()