SocketRocket

A conforming WebSocket (RFC 6455) client library for iOS, macOS, tvOS and visionOS.

Test results for SocketRocket here.
You can compare to what modern browsers look like here.

SocketRocket currently conforms to all core ~300 of Autobahn’s fuzzing tests
(aside from two UTF-8 ones where it is merely non-strict tests 6.4.2 and 6.4.4).

Features/Design

• TLS (wss) support, including self-signed certificates.
• Seems to perform quite well.
• Supports HTTP Proxies.
• Supports IPv4/IPv6.
• Supports SSL certificate pinning.
• Sends ping and can process pong events.
• Asynchronous and non-blocking. Most of the work is done on a background thread.
• Supports iOS, macOS, tvOS.

Installing

There are a few options. Choose one, or just figure it out:

• CocoaPods

Add the following line to your Podfile:

pod 'SocketRocket'

Run pod install, and you are all set.

• Carthage

Add the following line to your Cartfile:

github "facebook/SocketRocket"

Run carthage update, and you should now have the latest version of SocketRocket in your Carthage folder.

• Using SocketRocket as a sub-project

  You can also include SocketRocket as a subproject inside of your application if you’d prefer, although we do not recommend this, as it will increase your indexing time significantly. To do so, just drag and drop the SocketRocket.xcodeproj file into your workspace.

API

SRWebSocket

The Web Socket.

Note:

SRWebSocket will retain itself between -(void)open and when it closes, errors, or fails.
This is similar to how NSURLConnection behaves (unlike NSURLConnection, SRWebSocket won’t retain the delegate).

Interface

@interface SRWebSocket : NSObject

// Make it with this
- (instancetype)initWithURLRequest:(NSURLRequest *)request;

// Set this before opening
@property (nonatomic, weak) id <SRWebSocketDelegate> delegate;

// Open with this
- (void)open;

// Close it with this
- (void)close;

// Send a Data
- (void)sendData:(nullable NSData *)data error:(NSError **)error;

// Send a UTF8 String
- (void)sendString:(NSString *)string error:(NSError **)error;

@end

SRWebSocketDelegate

You implement this

@protocol SRWebSocketDelegate <NSObject>

@optional

- (void)webSocketDidOpen:(SRWebSocket *)webSocket;

- (void)webSocket:(SRWebSocket *)webSocket didReceiveMessageWithString:(NSString *)string;
- (void)webSocket:(SRWebSocket *)webSocket didReceiveMessageWithData:(NSData *)data;

- (void)webSocket:(SRWebSocket *)webSocket didFailWithError:(NSError *)error;
- (void)webSocket:(SRWebSocket *)webSocket didCloseWithCode:(NSInteger)code reason:(nullable NSString *)reason wasClean:(BOOL)wasClean;

@end

Testing

Included are setup scripts for the python testing environment.
It comes packaged with vitualenv so all the dependencies are installed in userland.

To run the short test from the command line, run:

  make test

To run all the tests, run:

  make test_all

The short tests don’t include the performance tests
(the test harness is actually the bottleneck, not SocketRocket).

The first time this is run, it may take a while to install the dependencies. It will be smooth sailing after that.

You can also run tests inside Xcode, which runs the same thing, but makes it easier to debug.

• Choose the SocketRocketTests target
• Make sure your running destination is either your Mac or any Simulator
• Run the test action (⌘+U)

TestChat Demo Application

SocketRocket includes a demo app, TestChat.
It will “chat” with a listening websocket on port 9900.

TestChat Server

The sever takes a message and broadcasts it to all other connected clients.

It requires some dependencies though to run.
We also want to reuse the virtualenv we made when we ran the tests.
If you haven’t run the tests yet, go into the SocketRocket root directory and type:

make test

This will set up your virtualenv.

Now, in your terminal:

source .env/bin/activate
pip install git+https://github.com/tornadoweb/tornado.git

In the same terminal session, start the chatroom server:

python TestChatServer/py/chatroom.py

There’s also a Go implementation (with the latest weekly) where you can:

cd TestChatServer/go
go run chatroom.go

Chatting

Now, start TestChat.app (just run the target in the Xcode project).
If you had it started already you can hit the refresh button to reconnect.
It should say “Connected!” on top.

To talk with the app, open up your browser to http://localhost:9000 and start chatting.

WebSocket Server Implementation Recommendations

SocketRocket has been used with the following libraries:

• Tornado
• Go’s WebSocket package or Gorilla’s version.
• Autobahn (using its fuzzing client).

The Tornado one is dirt simple and works like a charm.
(IPython notebook uses it too).
It’s much easier to configure handlers and routes than in Autobahn/twisted.

Contributing

We’re glad you’re interested in SocketRocket, and we’d love to see where you take it.
Please read our contributing guidelines prior to submitting a Pull Request.