CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonsslwebsocketdjango-channelsdaphne
Marc
Marc

Reputation: 115

wss (secure websocket) with Django Channels and Daphne webserver

I am trying to figure out how to set up Django Channels so that it accepts my websocket connections via the wss:// scheme.

For ws:// everything works perfectly. I use the websockets package on my client side to set up a connection to the server (which runs Channels as an ASGI server). But when I shift to wss:// and start running the client, then ... nothing happens for 60s, after which I get an error message stating: "SSL handshake is taking longer than 60.0 seconds: aborting the connection"

My Daphne server is running on localhost with standard port 8000. 

Starting ASGI/Channels version 2.2.0 development server at http://127.0.0.1:8000/
Quit the server with CONTROL-C.
INFO - 2019-11-15 14:12:14,094 - django-main-thread - daphne.server[110] - HTTP/2 support not enabled (install the http2 and tls Twisted extras)
INFO - 2019-11-15 14:12:14,094 - django-main-thread - daphne.server[119] - Configuring endpoint tcp:port=8000:interface=127.0.0.1
INFO - 2019-11-15 14:12:14,095 - django-main-thread - daphne.server[150] - Listening on TCP address 127.0.0.1:8000

I understand that HTTP and HTTPS as well as TCP and TLS should run on different ports, but since I haven't found any hint on the Django Channels readthedocs website on it, I thought it might just miraculously handle both without any config necessary. I guess I am wrong?

The client-side connection is established like this:

ssl_context = ssl.SSLContext(ssl.PROTOCOL_TLSv1_2)
    ssl_context.set_ciphers(get_allowed_ciphers())
    ssl_context.verify_mode = ssl.CERT_REQUIRED
    ssl_context.check_hostname = False

async with websockets.client.connect(
            uri=url,
            extra_headers=header,
            ssl=ssl_context) as websocket:
      await asyncio.gather(on_open(websocket), on_message(websocket))

The on_open() and on_message() methods handle the opening of the socket and parsing incoming messages, respectively.

Now, I was actually expecting to be able to set an SSL context on the server side (using Channels) as well, but I haven't found one single example after many hours of research online. I rather see only examples where nginx is configured to listen to port 443 and pointing to the necessary certificates.

I thought Daphne was a production-ready server that can handle both HTTP(s) and WebSocket (ws and wss) requests. What do I need Nginx for?

That may seem like a stupid question, but I'm happy for any help here.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 3489

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