Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
1076 lines (831 loc) · 42.9 KB

api.rst

File metadata and controls

1076 lines (831 loc) · 42.9 KB

API documentation

.. module:: h11

Contents

h11 has a fairly small public API, with all public symbols available directly at the top level:

.. ipython::

   In [2]: import h11

   @verbatim
   In [3]: h11.<TAB>
   h11.CLIENT                 h11.MUST_CLOSE
   h11.CLOSED                 h11.NEED_DATA
   h11.Connection             h11.PAUSED
   h11.ConnectionClosed       h11.PRODUCT_ID
   h11.Data                   h11.ProtocolError
   h11.DONE                   h11.RemoteProtocolError
   h11.EndOfMessage           h11.Request
   h11.ERROR                  h11.Response
   h11.IDLE                   h11.SEND_BODY
   h11.InformationalResponse  h11.SEND_RESPONSE
   h11.LocalProtocolError     h11.SERVER
   h11.MIGHT_SWITCH_PROTOCOL  h11.SWITCHED_PROTOCOL

These symbols fall into three main categories: event classes, special constants used to track different connection states, and the :class:`Connection` class itself. We'll describe them in that order.

Events

Events are the core of h11: the whole point of h11 is to let you think about HTTP transactions as being a series of events sent back and forth between a client and a server, instead of thinking in terms of bytes.

All events behave in essentially similar ways. Let's take :class:`Request` as an example. Like all events, this is a "final" class -- you cannot subclass it. And like all events, it has several fields. For :class:`Request`, there are four of them: :attr:`~Request.method`, :attr:`~Request.target`, :attr:`~Request.headers`, and :attr:`~Request.http_version`. :attr:`~Request.http_version` defaults to b"1.1"; the rest have no default, so to create a :class:`Request` you have to specify their values:

.. ipython:: python

   req = h11.Request(method="GET",
                     target="/",
                     headers=[("Host", "example.com")])

Event constructors accept only keyword arguments, not positional arguments.

Events have a useful repr:

.. ipython:: python

   req

And their fields are available as regular attributes:

.. ipython:: python

   req.method
   req.target
   req.headers
   req.http_version

Notice that these attributes have been normalized to byte-strings. In general, events normalize and validate their fields when they're constructed. Some of these normalizations and checks are specific to a particular event -- for example, :class:`Request` enforces RFC 7230's requirement that HTTP/1.1 requests must always contain a "Host" header:

.. ipython:: python

   # HTTP/1.0 requests don't require a Host: header
   h11.Request(method="GET", target="/", headers=[], http_version="1.0")


.. ipython:: python
   :okexcept:

   # But HTTP/1.1 requests do
   h11.Request(method="GET", target="/", headers=[])

This helps protect you from accidentally violating the protocol, and also helps protect you from remote peers who attempt to violate the protocol.

A few of these normalization rules are standard across multiple events, so we document them here:

:attr:`headers`: In h11, headers are represented internally as a list of (name, value) pairs, where name and value are both byte-strings, name is always lowercase, and name and value are both guaranteed not to have any leading or trailing whitespace. When constructing an event, we accept any iterable of pairs like this, and will automatically convert native strings containing ascii or :term:`bytes-like object`s to byte-strings and convert names to lowercase:

.. ipython:: python

   original_headers = [("HOST", bytearray(b"Example.Com"))]
   req = h11.Request(method="GET", target="/", headers=original_headers)
   original_headers
   req.headers

If any names are detected with leading or trailing whitespace, then this is an error ("in the past, differences in the handling of such whitespace have led to security vulnerabilities" -- RFC 7230). We also check for certain other protocol violations, e.g. it's always illegal to have a newline inside a header value, and Content-Length: hello is an error because Content-Length should always be an integer. We may add additional checks in the future.

While we make sure to expose header names as lowercased bytes, we also preserve the original header casing that is used. Compliant HTTP agents should always treat headers in a case insensitive manner, but this may not always be the case. When sending bytes over the wire we send headers preserving whatever original header casing was used.

It is possible to access the headers in their raw original casing, which may be useful for some user output or debugging purposes.

.. ipython:: python

    original_headers = [("Host", "example.com")]
    req = h11.Request(method="GET", target="/", headers=original_headers)
    req.headers.raw_items()

It's not just headers we normalize to being byte-strings: the same type-conversion logic is also applied to the :attr:`Request.method` and :attr:`Request.target` field, and -- for consistency -- all :attr:`http_version` fields. In particular, we always represent HTTP version numbers as byte-strings like b"1.1". :term:`Bytes-like object`s and native strings will be automatically converted to byte strings. Note that the HTTP standard specifically guarantees that all HTTP version numbers will consist of exactly two digits separated by a dot, so comparisons like req.http_version < b"1.1" are safe and valid.

When manually constructing an event, you generally shouldn't specify :attr:`http_version`, because it defaults to b"1.1", and if you attempt to override this to some other value then :meth:`Connection.send` will reject your event -- h11 only speaks HTTP/1.1. But it does understand other versions of HTTP, so you might receive events with other http_version values from remote peers.

Here's the complete set of events supported by h11:

.. autoclass:: Request


.. autoclass:: InformationalResponse


.. autoclass:: Response


.. autoclass:: Data


.. autoclass:: EndOfMessage


.. autoclass:: ConnectionClosed

The state machine

Now that you know what the different events are, the next question is: what can you do with them?

A basic HTTP request/response cycle looks like this:

And once that's finished, both sides either close the connection, or they go back to the top and re-use it for another request/response cycle.

To coordinate this interaction, the h11 :class:`Connection` object maintains several state machines: one that tracks what the client is doing, one that tracks what the server is doing, and a few more tiny ones to track whether :ref:`keep-alive <keepalive-and-pipelining>` is enabled and whether the client has proposed to :ref:`switch protocols <switching-protocols>`. h11 always keeps track of all of these state machines, regardless of whether it's currently playing the client or server role.

The state machines look like this (click on each to expand):

.. ipython:: python
   :suppress:

   import sys
   import subprocess
   subprocess.check_call([sys.executable,
                          sys._h11_hack_docs_source_path
                          + "/make-state-diagrams.py"])
client-image server-image
special-image

If you squint at the first two diagrams, you can see the client's IDLE -> SEND_BODY -> DONE path and the server's IDLE -> SEND_RESPONSE -> SEND_BODY -> DONE path, which encode the basic sequence of events we described above. But there's a fair amount of other stuff going on here as well.

The first thing you should notice is the different colors. These correspond to the different ways that our state machines can change state.

  • Dark blue arcs are event-triggered transitions: if we're in state A, and this event happens, when we switch to state B. For the client machine, these transitions always happen when the client sends an event. For the server machine, most of them involve the server sending an event, except that the server also goes from IDLE -> SEND_RESPONSE when the client sends a :class:`Request`.
  • Green arcs are state-triggered transitions: these are somewhat unusual, and are used to couple together the different state machines -- if, at any moment, one machine is in state A and another machine is in state B, then the first machine immediately transitions to state C. For example, if the CLIENT machine is in state DONE, and the SERVER machine is in the CLOSED state, then the CLIENT machine transitions to MUST_CLOSE. And the same thing happens if the CLIENT machine is in the state DONE and the keep-alive machine is in the state disabled.
  • There are also two purple arcs labeled :meth:`~Connection.start_next_cycle`: these correspond to an explicit method call documented below.

Here's why we have all the stuff in those diagrams above, beyond what's needed to handle the basic request/response cycle:

And finally, note that in these diagrams, all the labels that are in italics are informal English descriptions of things that happen in the code, while the labels in upright text correspond to actual objects in the public API. You've already seen the event objects like :class:`Request` and :class:`Response`; there are also a set of opaque sentinel values that you can use to track and query the client and server's states.

Special constants

h11 exposes some special constants corresponding to the different states in the client and server state machines described above. The complete list is:

.. data:: IDLE
          SEND_RESPONSE
          SEND_BODY
          DONE
          MUST_CLOSE
          CLOSED
          MIGHT_SWITCH_PROTOCOL
          SWITCHED_PROTOCOL
          ERROR

For example, we can see that initially the client and server start in state :data:`IDLE` / :data:`IDLE`:

.. ipython:: python

   conn = h11.Connection(our_role=h11.CLIENT)
   conn.states

And then if the client sends a :class:`Request`, then the client switches to state :data:`SEND_BODY`, while the server switches to state :data:`SEND_RESPONSE`:

.. ipython:: python

   conn.send(h11.Request(method="GET", target="/", headers=[("Host", "example.com")]));
   conn.states

And we can test these values directly using constants like :data:`SEND_BODY`:

.. ipython:: python

   conn.states[h11.CLIENT] is h11.SEND_BODY

This shows how the :class:`Connection` type tracks these state machines and lets you query their current state.

The above also showed the special constants that can be used to indicate the two different roles that a peer can play in an HTTP connection:

.. data:: CLIENT
          SERVER

And finally, there are also two special constants that can be returned from :meth:`Connection.next_event`:

.. data:: NEED_DATA
          PAUSED

These special constants are part of a PseudoEvent enum.

The Connection object

.. autoclass:: Connection

   .. automethod:: receive_data
   .. automethod:: next_event
   .. automethod:: send
   .. automethod:: send_with_data_passthrough
   .. automethod:: send_failed

   .. automethod:: start_next_cycle

   .. attribute:: our_role

      :data:`CLIENT` if this is a client; :data:`SERVER` if this is a server.

   .. attribute:: their_role

      :data:`SERVER` if this is a client; :data:`CLIENT` if this is a server.

   .. autoattribute:: states
   .. autoattribute:: our_state
   .. autoattribute:: their_state

   .. attribute:: their_http_version

      The version of HTTP that our peer claims to support. ``None`` if
      we haven't yet received a request/response.

      This is preserved by :meth:`start_next_cycle`, so it can be
      handy for a client making multiple requests on the same
      connection: normally you don't know what version of HTTP the
      server supports until after you do a request and get a response
      -- so on an initial request you might have to assume the
      worst. But on later requests on the same connection, the
      information will be available here.

   .. attribute:: client_is_waiting_for_100_continue

      True if the client sent a request with the ``Expect:
      100-continue`` header, and is still waiting for a response
      (i.e., the server has not sent a 100 Continue or any other kind
      of response, and the client has not gone ahead and started
      sending the body anyway).

      See `RFC 7231 section 5.1.1
      <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-5.1.1>`_ for details.

   .. attribute:: they_are_waiting_for_100_continue

      True if :attr:`their_role` is :data:`CLIENT` and
      :attr:`client_is_waiting_for_100_continue`.

   .. autoattribute:: trailing_data

Error handling

Given the vagaries of networks and the folks on the other side of them, it's extremely important to be prepared for errors.

Most errors in h11 are signaled by raising one of :exc:`ProtocolError`'s two concrete base classes, :exc:`LocalProtocolError` and :exc:`RemoteProtocolError`:

.. autoexception:: ProtocolError

.. autoexception:: LocalProtocolError

.. autoexception:: RemoteProtocolError

There are four cases where these exceptions might be raised:

So that's how h11 tells you about errors that it detects. In some cases, it's also useful to be able to tell h11 about an error that you detected. In particular, the :class:`Connection` object assumes that after you call :meth:`Connection.send`, you actually send that data to the remote peer. But sometimes, for one reason or another, this doesn't actually happen.

Here's a concrete example. Suppose you're using h11 to implement an HTTP client that keeps a pool of connections so it can re-use them when possible (see :ref:`keepalive-and-pipelining`). You take a connection from the pool, and start to do a large upload... but then for some reason this gets cancelled (maybe you have a GUI and a user clicked "cancel"). This can cause h11's model of this connection to diverge from reality: for example, h11 might think that you successfully sent the full request, because you passed an :class:`EndOfMessage` object to :meth:`Connection.send`, but in fact you didn't, because you never sent the resulting bytes. And then – here's the really tricky part! – if you're not careful, you might think that it's OK to put this connection back into the connection pool and re-use it, because h11 is telling you that a full request/response cycle was completed. But this is wrong; in fact you have to close this connection and open a new one.

The solution is simple: call :meth:`Connection.send_failed`, and now h11 knows that your send failed. In this case, :attr:`Connection.our_state` immediately becomes :data:`ERROR`, just like if you had tried to do something that violated the protocol.

Message body framing: Content-Length and all that

There are two different headers that HTTP/1.1 uses to indicate a framing mechanism for request/response bodies: Content-Length and Transfer-Encoding. Our general philosophy is that the way you tell h11 what configuration you want to use is by setting the appropriate headers in your request / response, and then h11 will both pass those headers on to the peer and encode the body appropriately.

Currently, the only supported Transfer-Encoding is chunked.

On requests, this means:

  • No Content-Length or Transfer-Encoding: no body, equivalent to Content-Length: 0.

  • Content-Length: ...: You're going to send exactly the specified number of bytes. h11 will keep track and signal an error if your :class:`EndOfMessage` doesn't happen at the right place.

  • Transfer-Encoding: chunked: You're going to send a variable / not yet known number of bytes.

    Note 1: only HTTP/1.1 servers are required to support Transfer-Encoding: chunked, and as a client you have to decide whether to send this header before you get to see what protocol version the server is using.

    Note 2: even though HTTP/1.1 servers are required to support Transfer-Encoding: chunked, this doesn't necessarily mean that they actually do -- e.g., applications using Python's standard WSGI API cannot accept chunked requests.

    Nonetheless, this is the only way to send request where you don't know the size of the body ahead of time, so if that's the situation you find yourself in then you might as well try it and hope.

On responses, things are a bit more subtle. There are effectively two cases:

  • Content-Length: ...: You're going to send exactly the specified number of bytes. h11 will keep track and signal an error if your :class:`EndOfMessage` doesn't happen at the right place.

  • Transfer-Encoding: chunked, or, neither framing header is provided: These two cases are handled differently at the wire level, but as far as the application is concerned they provide (almost) exactly the same semantics: in either case, you'll send a variable / not yet known number of bytes. The difference between them is that Transfer-Encoding: chunked works better (compatible with keep-alive, allows trailing headers, clearly distinguishes between successful completion and network errors), but requires an HTTP/1.1 client; for HTTP/1.0 clients the only option is the no-headers approach where you have to close the socket to indicate completion.

    Since this is (almost) entirely a wire-level-encoding concern, h11 abstracts it: when sending a response you can set either Transfer-Encoding: chunked or leave off both framing headers, and h11 will treat both cases identically: it will automatically pick the best option given the client's advertised HTTP protocol level.

    You need to watch out for this if you're using trailing headers (i.e., a non-empty headers attribute on :class:`EndOfMessage`), since trailing headers are only legal if we actually ended up using Transfer-Encoding: chunked. Trying to send a non-empty set of trailing headers to a HTTP/1.0 client will raise a :exc:`LocalProtocolError`. If this use case is important to you, check :attr:`Connection.their_http_version` to confirm that the client speaks HTTP/1.1 before you attempt to send any trailing headers.

Re-using a connection: keep-alive and pipelining

HTTP/1.1 allows a connection to be re-used for multiple request/response cycles (also known as "keep-alive"). This can make things faster by letting us skip the costly connection setup, but it does create some complexities: we have to keep track of whether a connection is reusable, and when there are multiple requests and responses flowing through the same connection we need to be careful not to get confused about which request goes with which response.

h11 considers a connection to be reusable if, and only if, both sides (a) speak HTTP/1.1 (HTTP/1.0 did have some complex and fragile support for keep-alive bolted on, but h11 currently doesn't support that -- possibly this will be added in the future), and (b) neither side has explicitly disabled keep-alive by sending a Connection: close header.

If you plan to make only a single request or response and then close the connection, you should manually set the Connection: close header in your request/response. h11 will notice and update its state appropriately.

There are also some situations where you are required to send a Connection: close header, e.g. if you are a server talking to a client that doesn't support keep-alive. You don't need to worry about these cases -- h11 will automatically add this header when necessary. Just worry about setting it when it's actually something that you're actively choosing.

If you want to re-use a connection, you have to wait until both the request and the response have been completed, bringing both the client and server to the :data:`DONE` state. Once this has happened, you can explicitly call :meth:`Connection.start_next_cycle` to reset both sides back to the :data:`IDLE` state. This makes sure that the client and server remain synched up.

If keep-alive is disabled for whatever reason -- someone set Connection: close, lack of protocol support, one of the sides just unilaterally closed the connection -- then the state machines will skip past the :data:`DONE` state directly to the :data:`MUST_CLOSE` or :data:`CLOSED` states. In this case, trying to call :meth:`~Connection.start_next_cycle` will raise an error, and the only thing you can legally do is to close this connection and make a new one.

HTTP/1.1 also allows for a more aggressive form of connection re-use, in which a client sends multiple requests in quick succession, and then waits for the responses to stream back in order ("pipelining"). This is generally considered to have been a bad idea, because it makes things like error recovery very complicated.

As a client, h11 does not support pipelining. This is enforced by the structure of the state machine: after sending one :class:`Request`, you can't send another until after calling :meth:`~Connection.start_next_cycle`, and you can't call :meth:`~Connection.start_next_cycle` until the server has entered the :data:`DONE` state, which requires reading the server's full response.

As a server, h11 provides the minimal support for pipelining required to comply with the HTTP/1.1 standard: if the client sends multiple pipelined requests, then we handle the first request until we reach the :data:`DONE` state, and then :meth:`~Connection.next_event` will pause and refuse to parse any more events until the response is completed and :meth:`~Connection.start_next_cycle` is called. See the next section for more details.

Flow control

Presumably you know when you want to send things, and the :meth:`~Connection.send` interface is very simple: it just immediately returns all the data you need to send for the given event, so you can apply whatever send buffer strategy you want. But reading from the remote peer is a bit trickier: you don't want to read data from the remote peer if it can't be processed (i.e., you want to apply backpressure and avoid building arbitrarily large in-memory buffers), and you definitely don't want to block waiting on data from the remote peer at the same time that it's blocked waiting for you, because that will cause a deadlock.

One complication here is that if you're implementing a server, you have to be prepared to handle :class:`Request`s that have an Expect: 100-continue header. You can read the spec for the full details, but basically what this header means is that after sending the :class:`Request`, the client plans to pause and wait until they see some response from the server before they send that request's :class:`Data`. The server's response would normally be an :class:`InformationalResponse` with status 100 Continue, but it could be anything really (e.g. a full :class:`Response` with a 4xx status code). The crucial thing as a server, though, is that you should never block trying to read a request body if the client is blocked waiting for you to tell them to send the request body.

Fortunately, h11 makes this easy, because it tracks whether the client is in the waiting-for-100-continue state, and exposes this as :attr:`Connection.they_are_waiting_for_100_continue`. So you don't have to pay attention to the Expect header yourself; you just have to make sure that before you block waiting to read a request body, you execute some code like:

if conn.they_are_waiting_for_100_continue:
    do_send(conn, h11.InformationalResponse(100, headers=[...]))
do_read(...)

In fact, if you're lazy (and what programmer isn't?) then you can just do this check before all reads -- it's mandatory before blocking to read a request body, but it's safe at any time.

And the other thing you want to pay attention to is the special values that :meth:`~Connection.next_event` might return: :data:`NEED_DATA` and :data:`PAUSED`.

:data:`NEED_DATA` is what it sounds like: it means that :meth:`~Connection.next_event` is guaranteed not to return any more real events until you've called :meth:`~Connection.receive_data` at least once.

:data:`PAUSED` is a little more subtle: it means that :meth:`~Connection.next_event` is guaranteed not to return any more real events until something else has happened to clear up the paused state. There are three cases where this can happen:

  1. We received a full request/response from the remote peer, and then we received some more data after that. (The main situation where this might happen is a server responding to a pipelining client.) The :data:`PAUSED` state will go away after you call :meth:`~Connection.start_next_cycle`.
  2. A successful CONNECT or Upgrade: request has caused the connection to switch to some other protocol (see :ref:`switching-protocols`). This :data:`PAUSED` state is permanent; you should abandon this :class:`Connection` and go do whatever it is you're going to do with your new protocol.
  3. We're a server, and the client we're talking to proposed to switch protocols (see :ref:`switching-protocols`), and now is waiting to find out whether their request was successful or not. Once we either accept or deny their request then this will turn into one of the above two states, so you probably don't need to worry about handling it specially.

Putting all this together --

If your I/O is organized around a "pull" strategy, where your code requests events as its ready to handle them (e.g. classic synchronous code, or asyncio's await loop.sock_recv(...), or Trio's streams), then you'll probably want logic that looks something like:

# Replace do_sendall and do_recv with your I/O code
def get_next_event():
    while True:
        event = conn.next_event()
        if event is h11.NEED_DATA:
            if conn.they_are_waiting_for_100_continue:
                do_sendall(conn, h11.InformationalResponse(100, ...))
            conn.receive_data(do_recv())
            continue
        return event

And then your code that calls this will need to make sure to call it only at appropriate times (e.g., not immediately after receiving :class:`EndOfMessage` or :data:`PAUSED`).

If your I/O is organized around a "push" strategy, where the network drives processing (e.g. you're using Twisted, or implementing an :class:`asyncio.Protocol`), then you'll want to internally apply back-pressure whenever you see :data:`PAUSED`, remove back-pressure when you call :meth:`~Connection.start_next_cycle`, and otherwise just deliver events as they arrive. Something like:

class HTTPProtocol(asyncio.Protocol):
    # Save the transport for later -- needed to access the
    # backpressure API.
    def connection_made(self, transport):
        self._transport = transport

    # Internal helper function -- deliver all pending events
    def _deliver_events(self):
        while True:
            event = self.conn.next_event()
            if event is h11.NEED_DATA:
                break
            elif event is h11.PAUSED:
                # Apply back-pressure
                self._transport.pause_reading()
                break
            else:
                self.event_received(event)

    # Called by "someone" whenever new data appears on our socket
    def data_received(self, data):
        self.conn.receive_data(data)
        self._deliver_events()

    # Called by "someone" whenever the peer closes their socket
    def eof_received(self):
        self.conn.receive_data(b"")
        self._deliver_events()
        # asyncio will close our socket unless we return True here.
        return True

    # Called by your code when its ready to start a new
    # request/response cycle
    def start_next_cycle(self):
        self.conn.start_next_cycle()
        # New events might have been buffered internally, and only
        # become deliverable after calling start_next_cycle
        self._deliver_events()
        # Remove back-pressure
        self._transport.resume_reading()

    # Fill in your code here
    def event_received(self, event):
        ...

And your code that uses this will have to remember to check for :attr:`~Connection.they_are_waiting_for_100_continue` at the appropriate time.

Closing connections

h11 represents a connection shutdown with the special event type :class:`ConnectionClosed`. You can send this event, in which case :meth:`~Connection.send` will simply update the state machine and then return None. You can receive this event, if you call conn.receive_data(b""). (The actual receipt might be delayed if the connection is :ref:`paused <flow-control>`.) It's safe and legal to call conn.receive_data(b"") multiple times, and once you've done this once, then all future calls to :meth:`~Connection.receive_data` will also return ConnectionClosed():

.. ipython:: python

   conn = h11.Connection(our_role=h11.CLIENT)
   conn.receive_data(b"")
   conn.receive_data(b"")
   conn.receive_data(None)

(Or if you try to actually pass new data in after calling conn.receive_data(b""), that will raise an exception.)

h11 is careful about interpreting connection closure in a half-duplex fashion. TCP sockets pretend to be a two-way connection, but really they're two one-way connections. In particular, it's possible for one party to shut down their sending connection -- which causes the other side to be notified that the connection has closed via the usual socket.recv(...) -> b"" mechanism -- while still being able to read from their receiving connection. (On Unix, this is generally accomplished via the shutdown(2) system call.) So, for example, a client could send a request, and then close their socket for writing to indicate that they won't be sending any more requests, and then read the response. It's this kind of closure that is indicated by h11's :class:`ConnectionClosed`: it means that this party will not be sending any more data -- nothing more, nothing less. You can see this reflected in the :ref:`state machine <state-machine>`, in which one party transitioning to :data:`CLOSED` doesn't immediately halt the connection, but merely prevents it from continuing for another request/response cycle.

The state machine also indicates that :class:`ConnectionClosed` events can only happen in certain states. This isn't true, of course -- any party can close their connection at any time, and h11 can't stop them. But what h11 can do is distinguish between clean and unclean closes. For example, if both sides complete a request/response cycle and then close the connection, that's a clean closure and everyone will transition to the :data:`CLOSED` state in an orderly fashion. On the other hand, if one party suddenly closes the connection while they're in the middle of sending a chunked response body, or when they promised a Content-Length: of 1000 bytes but have only sent 500, then h11 knows that this is a violation of the HTTP protocol, and will raise a :exc:`ProtocolError`. Basically h11 treats an unexpected close the same way it would treat unexpected, uninterpretable data arriving -- it lets you know that something has gone wrong.

As a client, the proper way to perform a single request and then close the connection is:

  1. Send a :class:`Request` with Connection: close
  2. Send the rest of the request body
  3. Read the server's :class:`Response` and body
  4. conn.our_state is h11.MUST_CLOSE will now be true. Call conn.send(ConnectionClosed()) and then close the socket. Or really you could just close the socket -- the thing calling send will do is raise an error if you're not in :data:`MUST_CLOSE` as expected. So it's between you and your conscience and your code reviewers.

(Technically it would also be legal to shutdown your socket for writing as step 2.5, but this doesn't serve any purpose and some buggy servers might get annoyed, so it's not recommended.)

As a server, the proper way to perform a response is:

  1. Send your :class:`Response` and body
  2. Check if conn.our_state is h11.MUST_CLOSE. This might happen for a variety of reasons; for example, if the response had unknown length and the client speaks only HTTP/1.0, then the client will not consider the connection complete until we issue a close.

You should be particularly careful to take into consideration the following note fromx RFC 7230 section 6.6:

If a server performs an immediate close of a TCP connection, there is a significant risk that the client will not be able to read the last HTTP response. If the server receives additional data from the client on a fully closed connection, such as another request that was sent by the client before receiving the server's response, the server's TCP stack will send a reset packet to the client; unfortunately, the reset packet might erase the client's unacknowledged input buffers before they can be read and interpreted by the client's HTTP parser.

To avoid the TCP reset problem, servers typically close a connection in stages. First, the server performs a half-close by closing only the write side of the read/write connection. The server then continues to read from the connection until it receives a corresponding close by the client, or until the server is reasonably certain that its own TCP stack has received the client's acknowledgement of the packet(s) containing the server's last response. Finally, the server fully closes the connection.

Switching protocols

h11 supports two kinds of "protocol switches": requests with method CONNECT, and the newer Upgrade: header, most commonly used for negotiating WebSocket connections. Both follow the same pattern: the client proposes that they switch from regular HTTP to some other kind of interaction, and then the server either rejects the suggestion -- in which case we return to regular HTTP rules -- or else accepts it. (For CONNECT, acceptance means a response with 2xx status code; for Upgrade:, acceptance means an :class:`InformationalResponse` with status 101 Switching Protocols) If the proposal is accepted, then both sides switch to doing something else with their socket, and h11's job is done.

As a developer using h11, it's your responsibility to send and interpret the actual CONNECT or Upgrade: request and response, and to figure out what to do after the handover; it's h11's job to understand what's going on, and help you make the handover smoothly.

Specifically, what h11 does is :ref:`pause <flow-control>` parsing incoming data at the boundary between the two protocols, and then you can retrieve any unprocessed data from the :attr:`Connection.trailing_data` attribute.

Support for sendfile()

Many networking APIs provide some efficient way to send particular data, e.g. asking the operating system to stream files directly off of the disk and into a socket without passing through userspace.

It's possible to use these APIs together with h11. The basic strategy is:

  • Create some placeholder object representing the special data, that your networking code knows how to "send" by invoking whatever the appropriate underlying APIs are.
  • Make sure your placeholder object implements a __len__ method returning its size in bytes.
  • Call conn.send_with_data_passthrough(Data(data=<your placeholder object>))
  • This returns a list whose contents are a mixture of (a) bytes-like objects, and (b) your placeholder object. You should send them to the network in order.

Here's a sketch of what this might look like:

class FilePlaceholder:
    def __init__(self, file, offset, count):
        self.file = file
        self.offset = offset
        self.count = count

    def __len__(self):
        return self.count

def send_data(sock, data):
    if isinstance(data, FilePlaceholder):
        # socket.sendfile added in Python 3.5
        sock.sendfile(data.file, data.offset, data.count)
    else:
        # data is a bytes-like object to be sent directly
        sock.sendall(data)

placeholder = FilePlaceholder(open("...", "rb"), 0, 200)
for data in conn.send_with_data_passthrough(Data(data=placeholder)):
    send_data(sock, data)

This works with all the different framing modes (Content-Length, Transfer-Encoding: chunked, etc.) -- h11 will add any necessary framing data, update its internal state, and away you go.

Identifying h11 in requests and responses

According to RFC 7231, client requests are supposed to include a User-Agent: header identifying what software they're using, and servers are supposed to respond with a Server: header doing the same. h11 doesn't construct these headers for you, but to make it easier for you to construct this header, it provides:

.. data:: PRODUCT_ID

   A string suitable for identifying the current version of h11 in a
   ``User-Agent:`` or ``Server:`` header.

   The version of h11 that was used to build these docs identified
   itself as:

   .. ipython:: python

      h11.PRODUCT_ID

Chunked Transfer Encoding Delimiters

.. versionadded:: 0.7.0

HTTP/1.1 allows for the use of Chunked Transfer Encoding to frame request and response bodies. This form of transfer encoding allows the implementation to provide its body data in the form of length-prefixed "chunks" of data.

RFC 7230 is extremely clear that the breaking points between chunks of data are non-semantic: that is, users should not rely on them or assign any meaning to them. This is particularly important given that RFC 7230 also allows intermediaries such as proxies and caches to change the chunk boundaries as they see fit, or even to remove the chunked transfer encoding entirely.

However, for some applications it is valuable or essential to see the chunk boundaries because the peer implementation has assigned meaning to them. While this is against the specification, if you do really need access to this information h11 makes it available to you in the form of the :data:`Data.chunk_start` and :data:`Data.chunk_end` properties of the :class:`Data` event.

:data:`Data.chunk_start` is set to True for the first :class:`Data` event for a given chunk of data. :data:`Data.chunk_end` is set to True for the last :class:`Data` event that is emitted for a given chunk of data. h11 guarantees that it will always emit at least one :class:`Data` event for each chunk of data received from the remote peer, but due to its internal buffering logic it may return more than one. It is possible for a single :class:`Data` event to have both :data:`Data.chunk_start` and :data:`Data.chunk_end` set to True, in which case it will be the only :class:`Data` event for that chunk of data.

Again, it is strongly encouraged that you avoid relying on this information if at all possible. This functionality should be considered an escape hatch for when there is no alternative but to rely on the information, rather than a general source of data that is worth relying on.