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pythonsockets
Jon Cairns
Jon Cairns

Reputation: 11949

Why specify a host when creating a socket server in Python?

When setting up a server socket in Python, the socket.bind(address) method allows you to specify the address as a tuple like (host, port). However, the first example shows that you can specify the host as '' as a shortcut to mean all interfaces (IPv4).

I can see how it could be useful to limit which interfaces a server socket listens on for the purposes of security. However, is there any other reason why you'd want to specify a host/IP address?

The reason for me asking is that I maintain a debugger interface written in Python. Someone has asked me why I don't just use '' as the host, so that remote clients can connect without any config change. This doesn't feel right somehow, but felt like a more technical explanation would be necessary!

Thanks in advance.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 104

Answers (1)

John La Rooy
John La Rooy

Reputation: 304483

An obvious example is the case of running a service on a multihomed machine.

Maybe you want a different key for the sshd on each ip address.

Or totally different web servers all listening on port 80 but different addresses.

You get the idea.

I can't see why it would be necessary in your case unless you want multiple instances of the debugger running or to limit connections to localhost for example.

Upvotes: 1

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