I'm trying to make a simple proxy server in Python using the socket library, mostly to understand how it works. I'm a noob both at programming and networking, so please be nice if my questions are totally dumb.
At the moment I've set up a proxy server which intercepts requests from the browser, prints them and sends back an "Hello" sample response. It seems to work, so next I'm going to complete it by adding a client which forwards the request to the web server, receives the response and sends it back to the browser.
However, I have two doubts about this first (seemingly working) part of the code:
import socket, threading
serv_port = 50007
server = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
server.bind(('', serv_port))
server.listen(5)
while True:
#get conn to client
conn, addr = server.accept()
#span thread
conn_thread = threading.Thread(target=cthread, args=(conn,))
conn_thread.start()
def cthread(conn):
#set timeout
conn.settimeout(1)
#receive data until null data is received or socket times out
req = b''
while True:
try:
req_pack = conn.recv(4096)
if not req_pack:
break
else:
req += req_pack
except socket.timeout:
break
print req #print request to stdout
#send a sample response
conn.send(b'HTTP/1.1 200 OK\n\n<h1>Hello</h1') #QUESTION 1
conn.close() #QUESTION 2
My first question is about threading. Should I leave everything as it is, or should I, after receiving a request, span a different thread to deal with the response part?
Sample code of what I mean:
#in function cthread
print req
#span thread
resp_thread = threading.Thread(target=respthread, args=(conn, req))
resp_thread.start()
def respthread(conn, req):
#do everything that's to be done to get response, send it to browser
conn.send(b'HTTP/1.1 200 OK\n\n<h1>Hello</h1') #sample response
conn.close()
Another question: is it correct to close the connection to the browser (conn) after each response has been sent, or does it slow connections too much and it's possible to do without?
