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simple socket programming exercise for TCP connections in Python; Error: "No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it"

*Before you mark as duplicate please note that I am referencing this similar question found here:
Python Socket Programming - ConnectionRefusedError: [WinError 10061] No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it
unfortunately but have found anything in that post that provides a solution to my problem.
I am working on a very basic exercise designed to familiarize students with programming related to networks. This particular assignment is a common one as is described as follows:
In this assignment, you will learn the basics of socket programming for TCP connections in Python: how to create a socket, bind it to a specific address and port, as well as send and receive an HTTP packet. You will also learn some basics of HTTP header format. You can only use Python3.
You will develop a web server that handles one HTTP request at a time. Your web server should accept and parse the HTTP request, get the requested file from the server’s file system, create an HTTP response message consisting of the requested file preceded by header lines, and then send the response directly to the client. If the requested file is not present in the server, the server should send an HTTP “404 Not Found” message back to the client.
Part one specification:
Put the attached HTML file (named HelloWorld.html) in the same directory in which the server webserver.py runs. Run the server program. Determine the IP address of the host that is running the server (e.g., 128.238.251.26 or localhost). From another host, open a browser and provide the corresponding URL. For example: http://128.238.251.26:6789/HelloWorld.html. You can open a browser in the same host where the server runs and use the following http://localhost:6789/HelloWorld.html.
‘HelloWorld.html’ is the name of the file you placed in the server directory. Note also the use of the port number after the colon. You need to replace this port number with the port number that was assigned to you. In the above example, we have used port number 6789. The browser should then display the contents of HelloWorld.html. If you omit “:6789”, the browser will assume port 80 (why?), and you will get the web page from the server only if your server is listening at port 80.
Then try to get a file that is not present on the server (e.g., test.html). You should get a “404 File Not Found” message.
Part Two specification:
Write your own HTTP client to test your server. Your client will connect to the server using a TCP connection, send an HTTP request to the server, and display the server response as an output. You can assume that the HTTP request sent is a GET method. The client should take command line arguments specifying the server IP address or hostname, the port at which the server is listening, and the HTTP file name (e.g., test.html or HelloWorld.html). The following is an input command format to run the client. webclient.py <server_host> <server_port>
My code is for the Webserver is as follows:
#import socket module
from socket import *
import sys # In order to terminate the program
serverSocket = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM)
# Prepare a sever socket
# Fill in start
serverHost = '192.168.1.4'
serverPort = 56014
serverSocket.bind((serverHost, serverPort))
serverSocket.listen(5)
# Fill in end
while True:
#establish connection
print('The server is ready to receive')
connectionSocket, addr = serverSocket.accept() # Fill in start #Fill in end
try:
message = connectionSocket.recv(4096) # Fill in start #Fill in end
filename = message.split()[1]
f = open(filename[1:])
outputdata = f.readlines() # Fill in start #Fill in end
# send one http header line in to the socket
# Fill in start
connectionSocket.send("HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\nContent-Type: text/html\r\n")
connectionSocket.send("\r\n")
# Fill in end
# Send the content of the requested file to the connection socket
for i in range(0, len(outputdata)):
connectionSocket.send(outputdata[i].encode())
connectionSocket.send("\r\n".encode())
connectionSocket.close()
except IOError:
# Send HTTP response code and message for file not found
# Fill in start
connectionSocket.send("HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found\r\n")
connectionSocket.send("Content-Type: text/html\r\n")
connectionSocket.send("\r\n")
connectionSocket.send("<html><head></head><body><h1>404 Not Found</h1></body></html><\r\n>")
# Fill in end
# Close the client connection socket
# Fill in start
serverSocket.close()
# Fill in end
serverSocket.close()
sys.exit() # Terminate the program after sending the corresponding data
My code for the Webclient is as follows:
from socket import *
import sys
serverName = sys.argv[1]
serverPort = int(sys.argv[2])
fileName = sys.argv[3]
request = "GET "+str(fileName)+" HTTP/1.1"
clientSocket = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM)
clientSocket.connect((serverName, serverPort))
clientSocket.send(request.encode())
returnFromSever = clientSocket.recv(4096)
while(len(returnFromSever)>0):
print(returnFromSever.decode())
returnFromSever = clientSocket.recv(4096)
clientSocket.close()
The error I am receiving is:
"No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it"
Admittedly, I know almost nothing about network related programming and on top of that I am not familiar with the Python syntax (my entire degree program was exclusively in Java) so I am very lost here and somewhat desperate.
If anyone could please point me in the right direction as far as how to correct this error, I would be very deeply grateful.
Thanks

The error you are getting (No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it) means that the port you are trying to connect to is not not being listened on the server.
For example, if you try to connect to 192.168.1.1:80 (IP = 192.168.1.1, port=80) and the server on 192.168.1.1 doesn't listen on port 80, you would receive this error.
A few things I would check in your case:
Is your server IP actually 192.168.1.4 ? If not, set it to the correct IP of the interface you want to listen on. If you want to listen on all the interfaces of the server, use this: serverHost = '0.0.0.0'
Does your client code attempt to connect to the server port? The server port is 56014. You need to pass it as the second parameter of your client program (because of this line serverPort = int(sys.argv[2])).

Connecting to Python socket from iOS Safari browser

I have a python socket listening on my computer's ip address on a specific port. I am using the standard python socket library with something like the following code:
listen_socket = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
listen_socket.setsockopt(socket.SOL_SOCKET, socket.SO_REUSEADDR, 1)
listen_socket.bind(server_address) # Server address is a tuple (HOST, PORT) with host being
# something like 123.456.789.00 and port being 4000
listen_socket.listen()
client_connection, client_address = listen_socket.accept()
request_data = client_connection.recv(1024).decode('utf-8')
print(request_data)
When I use Chrome on my iPhone to connect to the address, the rest of my code runs fine and processes the incoming request by sending an html page. When I use Safari, it loads for a while until it fails and a says "Safari cannot open the page because it could not connect to the server."
Funny enough, if I stay on the page, restart the server, and then reload the page using the refresh button, it connects fine. But trying to access the address through the url address does not work. Refreshing using the refresh button seems to work. Why is Safari having trouble connecting to my Python socket?

Try increasing the backlog count in the listen_socket.listen() call.
I had a similar issue with a python 2 socket server and macOS Safari. Safari would say it could not connect to the server, but Chrome/Firefox/IE/curl all worked without any errors. I changed this:
listen_socket.listen(1)
To this:
listen_socket.listen(5)
Safari then worked without any errors. I am now using 128 instead of 5, not sure what the default is in Python 3.
When set to 1, in the python server I would see Safari connect, but then socket.recv() would never return.

PUT request blocking too long with simple custom HTTP client and server

I have implemented a simple HTTP server and a client. The latter issues a PUT request using the requests library, sending some arbitrary JSON and then exits.
When I start the server, and then run the client, both the server and the client block. The server however appears to not have gone through the entire handler function yet.
This is what I get on server side:
$ python3 server.py
PUT / HTTP/1.1
That is, after printing the request line, the content JSON string is not printed. At this point both client and server block for some reason.
Interestingly, when I trigger a KeyboardInterrupt to the client, the server proceeds:
$ python3 server.py
PUT / HTTP/1.1
b'{"content": "Hello World"}'
127.0.0.1 - - [25/Feb/2016 11:52:54] "PUT / HTTP/1.1" 200 -
My questions:
Why is it necessary to kill the client to let the server proceed?
Am I using any of these components the wrong way?
How can I make client and server to operate (nearly) instantaneously?
This is the code of the HTTP server. It only handles PUT requests. It prints the request line and the content data and responds using the success code to the client:
import http.server
class PrintPUTRequestHandler(http.server.BaseHTTPRequestHandler):
def do_PUT(self):
print(self.requestline)
print(self.rfile.read())
self.send_response(200)
self.end_headers()
server_address = ('', 8000)
httpd = http.server.HTTPServer(server_address, PrintHTTPRequestHandler)
httpd.serve_forever()
This is the HTTP client. It is intended to connect to the server, write the request and return as soon as possible (but it doesn't):
import requests
server_address = "http://127.1:8000"
data = '{"content": "Hello World"}'
requests.put(server_address, data, headers={"Content-type": "application/json"})
This is how I run it after the server has started (no output observable):
python client.py

The server blocks both itself and the client on this line:
print(self.rfile.read())
That happens because you didn't specify the amount of data to be read so the server reads the input stream until it is closed. And in your case the input stream is closed once you kill the client.
Remember that the server doesn't know a priori when the streaming of data ends because you may want to send data chunk by chunk (for example when you send big files).
The size of request should be passed in Content-Length header so this is what you should do:
length = int(self.headers['Content-Length'])
print(self.rfile.read(length))
That's assuming that the length is small enough to fit in your memory (and in your case it is).

Python sockets: How do I get the address a client is connected to?

I have some code that hosts a local server and when a user connects it will send them some html code, which works fine.
But I want it so if they connect to http://localhost:90/abc it will show something different. How can I get the exact url they connected to?
Here is my code:
import socket
sock = socket.socket()
sock.bind(('', 90))
sock.listen(5)
print("Listening...")
while True:
client, address = sock.accept()
print("Connection recieved: ", address)
print(The exact url they connected to.)
print()
client.send(b'HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n')
client.send(b"Content-Type: text/html\r\n\r\n")
client.send(b'<html><body><h1>Hello, User!</body></html>')
client.close()
sock.close()
I tried print(client.getpeername()[1]), but that gets the client ip, and if there is a similar way to get the ip they connected to it probably wont get the 'abc' part of the url.
Thanks in advance.

Socket's don't have a notion of URL, that's specific to the HTTP protocol which runs on top of a socket. For this reason, only part of the HTTP URL is even used in the creation of a socket.
|--1---|----2----|-3-|--4-|
http:// localhost :90 /abc
Specifies which protocol inside of TCP the URL uses
Specifies the remote host, either by IP address or hostname
Specifies the remote port and is optional
Specifies the path of the URL
Only parts 2 and 3 are actually known to a TCP socket though! This is because TCP is a very basic form of communication, HTTP adds a bunch of functionality on top of it like requests and responses and paths and so on.
Basically if you're implementing an HTTP server, knowing the /abc part is your job. Take a look at this example. The client actually sends the /abc part to the server, otherwise it has no way of knowing which path the request is for.

When the client connects to your server, it will send:
GET /abc HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost
more headers...
<blank line>
Your server needs to parse the GET line and extract /abc from that.

how to get input from html using python socket

I have a code to start a simple socket sever on localhost. However, I want it to display a html page when it is accessed through browser. The html will contain two text fields and submit button. When user enters text in text fields and clicks on submit button, I want the program to read from text fields. How Can I Do That?

The instant answer (I hope so) to your question is in the last section The Answer - and, if I have interpreted your question wrong, let me know in the comment section.
The confusion - You are confusing the fundamentals - to display a html page, you simply need a server (localhost in your case), and the browser will use the HTTP/HTTPS protocol to fetch that content/response/html page. In Python (almost same for other languages) there are two levels of access to network services:
Low-level via sockets.
Higher-level via application level network protocols, like HTTP, FTP, etc.
Sockets - in plain english it is a functionality (interface) provided by the machine's operating system to implement client and server (for the higher-level network protocols) like communication between the processes. These processes can be running on a same machine or both processes on physically apart machines (e.g. requesting a website using browser).
A typical socket client is (asking for the desired html from browser):
client_sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
client_sock.connect(("localhost", 80))
But to make it work you must already have server running (which will serve the html):
server_sock = socket.socket() # Create a socket object
server_sock.bind((localhost, 80)) # Bind to the port
server_sock.listen(5)
while True:
# lines for whatever we want server to do
The line server_sock.bind((localhost, 80)) has binded (assigned/allocated) the localhost:80 (a socket is basically 'host_name:port_number') to this server_sock i.e. any call/request to localhost:80 will be handled as per the lines in the above while True: block of the code above, can be a text response, HTML, etc.
Typical web scenario - We enter a website name www.google.com (which is resolved into an IP via DNS protocol - a whole another story) and hit enter, we'll get the Google's search homepage in response - Here you're the client, that is entering the website name and hitting enter is technically client_sock.connect('www.google.com', 80), and it only worked because on another (remote) machine/system/host they have server_socket binded and listening i.e.
server_sock.bind('machine's_IP', 80)
server_sock.listen(5)
while True:
#accept connections from outside
(client_socket, address) = server_socket.accept()
# here will be the lines which send us back the Google's
# homepage html as a response to our web request.
To sum-up, servers (webserver in your case) can be implemented using (almost) any programming languages e.g. python or C, etc, but the basis, the lowest layer, exactly where the data is passed between 2 processes whether on the same machine using locahost (loopback) or each process running on physically apart machine/host (typical web scenario ) via the HTTP (TCP) protocol rest upon sockets. Sockets are the fundamental building block from which HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SMTP protocols (all of these are TCP-type protocols) are defined.
DNS, DHCP, VOIP protocols are UDP protocols but they too are built on top of sockets.
The Answer - To start, create a web_server.py and paste the following code (only to see how it works) and run the file as script i.e. from the file's location run "python
web_server.py" in command prompt/terminal:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import socket
host = 'localhost'
port = 80
server_sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET,\
socket.SOCK_STREAM) # Create a socket object
server_sock.bind((host , port)) # Bind to the port
print 'Starting server on', host, port
print 'The Web server URL for this would be http://%s:%d/' % (host, port)
server_sock.listen(5) # Now wait for client connection.
print 'Entering infinite loop; hit CTRL-C to exit'
while True:
# Establish connection with client.
client_sock, (client_host, client_port) = socket.socket.accept()
print 'Got connection from', client_host, client_port
client_sock.recv(1000) # should receive request from client. (GET ....)
client_sock.send('HTTP/1.0 200 OK\n')
client_sock.send('Content-Type: text/html\n')
client_sock.send('\n') # header and body should be separated by additional newline
# you can paste your 2 text field html here in the <body>
client_sock.send("""
<html>
<body>
<h1>Hello World</h1> this is my server!
</body>
</html>
""")
client_sock.close()
P.S. You have to implement a HTTP server (webserver) - which will definitely use the socket interface at the lowest level i.e.
server_sock.bind
server_sock.listen
server_sock.accept