Telnet Tutorial

Overview

Welcome to our 2nd circuits tutorial. This tutorial is going to walk you through the telnet Example showing you how to various parts of the circuits component library for building a simple TCP client that also accepts user input.

Be sure you have circuits installed before you start:

pip install circuits

See: Installing

Components

You will need the following components:

  1. The TCPClient Component

  2. The File Component

  3. The Component Component

All these are available in the circuits library so there is nothing for you to do. Click on each to read more about them.

Design

strict digraph { TCPClient -> Select [weight="2.0"]; Telnet -> TCPClient [weight="1.0"]; Telnet -> File [weight="1.0"]; }

The above graph is the overall design of our Telnet application. What’s shown here is a relationship of how the components fit together and the overall flow of events.

For example:

  1. Connect to remote TCP Server.

  2. Read input from User.

  3. Write input from User to connected Socket.

  4. Wait for data from connected Socket and display.

Note

The Select Component shown is required by our application for Asynchronous I/O polling however we do not need to explicitly use it as it is automatically imported and registered simply by utilizing the TCPClient Component.

Implementation

Without further delay here’s the code:

 1#!/usr/bin/env python
 2
 3import sys
 4
 5from circuits import Component, handler
 6from circuits.io import File
 7from circuits.net.events import connect, write
 8from circuits.net.sockets import TCPClient
 9
10
11class Telnet(Component):
12    channel = 'telnet'
13
14    def init(self, host, port):
15        self.host = host
16        self.port = port
17
18        TCPClient(channel=self.channel).register(self)
19        File(sys.stdin, channel='stdin').register(self)
20
21    def ready(self, socket):
22        self.fire(connect(self.host, self.port))
23
24    def read(self, data):
25        print(data.strip())
26
27    @handler('read', channel='stdin')
28    def read_user_input(self, data):
29        self.fire(write(data))
30
31
32host = sys.argv[1]
33port = int(sys.argv[2])
34
35Telnet(host, port).run()

Download telnet.py

Discussion

Some important things to note…

  1. Notice that we defined a channel for out Telnet Component?

    This is so that the events of TCPClient and File don’t collide. Both of these components share a very similar interface in terms of the events they listen to.

class Telnet(Component):

    channel = "telnet"

  1. Notice as well that in defining a channel for our Telnet Component we’ve also “registered” the TCPClient Component so that it has the same channel as our Telnet Component.

    Why? We want our Telnet Component to receive all of the events of the TCPClient Component.

TCPClient(channel=self.channel).register(self)

  1. In addition to our TCPClient Component being registered with the same channel as our Telnet Component we can also see that we have registered a File Component however we have chosen a different channel here called stdin.

    Why? We don’t want the events from TCPClient and subsequently our Telnet Component to collide with the events from File.

    So we setup a Component for reading user input by using the File Component and attaching an event handler to our Telnet Component but listening to events from our stdin channel.

File(sys.stdin, channel="stdin").register(self)

@handler("read", channel="stdin")
def read_user_input(self, data):
    self.fire(write(data))

Here is what the event flow would look like if you were to register the Debugger to the Telnet Component.

from circuits import Debugger
(Telnet(host, port) + Debugger()).run()

$ python telnet.py 10.0.0.2 8000
<registered[telnet] (<TCPClient/telnet 21995:MainThread (queued=0) [S]>, <Telnet/telnet 21995:MainThread (queued=4) [R]> )>
<registered[stdin] (<File/stdin 21995:MainThread (queued=0) [S]>, <Telnet/telnet 21995:MainThread (queued=5) [R]> )>
<registered[*] (<Debugger/* 21995:MainThread (queued=0) [S]>, <Telnet/telnet 21995:MainThread (queued=5) [R]> )>
<started[telnet] (<Telnet/telnet 21995:MainThread (queued=4) [R]> )>
<registered[select] (<Select/select 21995:MainThread (queued=0) [S]>, <TCPClient/telnet 21995:MainThread (queued=0) [S]> )>
<ready[telnet] (<TCPClient/telnet 21995:MainThread (queued=0) [S]> )>
<ready[stdin] (<File/stdin 21995:MainThread (queued=0) [S]> )>
<connect[telnet] ('10.0.0.2', 8000 )>
<_open[stdin] ( )>
<connected[telnet] ('10.0.0.2', 8000 )>
<opened[stdin] ('<stdin>', 'r' )>
Hello World!
<_read[stdin] (<open file '<stdin>', mode 'r' at 0x7f32ff5ab0c0> )>
<read[stdin] ('Hello World!\n' )>
<write[telnet] ('Hello World!\n' )>
<_write[telnet] (<socket._socketobject object at 0x11f7f30> )>
<_read[telnet] (<socket._socketobject object at 0x11f7f30> )>
<read[telnet] ('Hello World!\n' )>
Hello World!
^C<signal[telnet] (2, <frame object at 0x12b0a10> )>
<stopped[telnet] (<Telnet/telnet 21995:MainThread (queued=0) [S]> )>
<close[telnet] ( )>
<close[stdin] ( )>
<disconnected[telnet] ( )>
<closed[stdin] ( )>

Testing

To try this example out, download a copy of the echoserver Example and copy and paste the full source code of the Telnet example above into a file called telnet.py.

In one terminal run:

$ python echoserver.py

In a second terminal run:

$ python telnet.py localhost 8000

Have fun!

For more examples see examples.

See also