Acquis 9 - Network

The network library provides TCP, UDP, and HTTP/HTTPS networking with native SSL support.

HTTP requests

Use network.fetch for HTTP and HTTPS requests:

local status, body, headers = network.fetch("https://httpbin.org/get")
print(status)  -- 200
print(#body)   -- response size
print(headers["content-type"])  -- "application/json"

POST requests

Pass method, headers, and body as additional arguments:

local status, body = network.fetch(
  "https://httpbin.org/post",
  "POST",
  {["Content-Type"] = "application/json"},
  '{"name": "Lus"}'
)

Error handling

Network errors raise Lua errors:

local ok, err = catch network.fetch("https://invalid.host.example")
if not ok then
  print("Request failed:", err)
end

TCP connections

Client connections

Connect to a TCP server and exchange data:

local sock = network.tcp.connect("example.com", 80)
sock:settimeout(5)  -- 5 second timeout

sock:send("GET / HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: example.com\r\n\r\n")
local response = sock:receive("*a")  -- receive until EOF
sock:close()

Receive patterns

The receive method supports several patterns:

-- Receive exactly N bytes
local data = sock:receive(1024)

-- Receive a line (strips trailing newline)
local line = sock:receive("*l")

-- Receive all data until EOF
local all = sock:receive("*a")

TCP servers

Create a listening server:

local server = network.tcp.bind("127.0.0.1", 8080)
server:settimeout(10)

local client = server:accept()
client:settimeout(5)

local request = client:receive("*l")
client:send("HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n\r\nHello!\n")
client:close()

server:close()

UDP sockets

Create, send, and receive datagrams:

-- Sender
local sender = network.udp.open()
sender:sendto("Hello UDP", "127.0.0.1", 9000)
sender:close()

-- Receiver (bound to port)
local receiver = network.udp.open(9000, "127.0.0.1")
local data, addr, port = receiver:receive()
print(data, addr, port)  -- "Hello UDP", "127.0.0.1", sender_port
receiver:close()

Socket methods

TCP client socket

TCP server

UDP socket

Motivation

Lus provides native networking without external dependencies. The library handles platform differences transparently.

Single-call HTTP

Compare to using raw sockets:

-- Without network.fetch: 20+ lines of socket, TLS, HTTP parsing
-- With network.fetch:
local status, body = network.fetch("https://api.example.com/data")

Cross-platform consistency

The library handles platform-specific socket APIs (Winsock vs POSIX) and TLS configuration transparently.