The WebSocket Transfer Agent
wsta is a cli tool written in rust for interfacing with WebSockets. wsta has
the philosophy of being an easy tool to learn and thus gets out of your way to
let you work your UNIX magic directly on the WebSocket traffic.
The way wsta does this is to be as pipe-friendly as possible, letting you
chain it into complex pipelines or bash scripts as you see fit, or just keep it
simple and use it as is.
See the manual or type man wsta for details.
Since wsta is really pipe-friendly, you can easily work with your output in
a way that suits you. If you have a websocket-service that returns JSON, you
might want to have your data printed in a nice, readable format.
jq is perfect for that.
$ wsta ws://echo.websocket.org '{"values":{"test": "what?"}}' | jq .values
Connected to ws://echo.websocket.org
{
"test": "what?"
}Because wsta reads from stdin, it can also be used as an interactive prompt
if you wish to send messages to the server interactively.
$ wsta ws://echo.websocket.org
Connected to ws://echo.websocket.org
ping
ping
hello
helloIf you're debugging some nasty problem with your stream, you are probably only
interested in frames related to your problem. Good news, grep is here to save
the day!
$ while true; do echo $(( RANDOM %= 200 )); sleep 0.2; done | wsta ws://echo.websocket.org | grep '147'
147
147
147
147
147
147Use wsta to monitor your websocket uptime. Use the --ping option to keep
the connection alive, and check the exit code for issues. You can also send
the last few messages with POST data for a higher quality alert.
#!/bin/bash
while true; do
# Start persistent connection, pinging evey 10 seconds to stay alive
wsta -v --ping 10 ws://echo.websocket.org > messages.txt
if [ $? -gt 0 ]; then
tail messages.txt | curl -F "messages=@-" https://SOUNDTHEALARM.yourcompany.com
fi
sleep 30
doneIf you need to load test your server over a WebSocket connection, it is simple to write a short bash script to do this. The following example uses a loop to continously send messages to the server and saturate the connection as much as possible. This example could also be ran in parallel as many times as required to add more saturated connections to the load test.
#!/bin/bash
for i in {1..1000}
do
echo subscribe?giveMeLotsOfData=true&id=$i
echo unsubscribe?id=$i
done | wsta ws://echo.websocket.orgwsta also supports binary data using the --binary argument. When provided,
all data read from stdin is assumed to be in binary format. The following
simplified example records a binary stream from the microphone and sends it
continously to the server, reading the response JSON as it comes in.
For more information on binary mode, see the manual and #5.
$ arecord --format=S16_LE --rate=44100 | wsta -b 'wss://example.com' | jq .results
"hello "
"hello this is me "
"hello this is me talking to "
"hello this is me talking to people "
"hello this is me talking to people "A neat feature of wsta is the ability to have several separate configuration
profiles. Configuration profiles are basically presets of CLI arguments like
urls and headers saved to a file for easy reuse at a later point.
If you have web services in different environments, you might for example want
to have a foo-dev and foo-prod configuration file. This makes it easy to at
a later date connect to foo by simply running wsta -P foo-dev,
These files could be checked into VCS and shared between colleagues.
An example of a configuration file:
url = "ws://echo.websocket.org";
headers = ["Origin:google.com", "Foo:Bar"];
show_headers = true;See the manual for more information.
Currently the only requirement to run wsta is rust-openssl. If you get an error
about a missing ssllib.so or similar, try installing OpenSSL runtime libraries
and headers. Have a look at this link
for instructions on how to do so.
I've set up a download page here that you can get wsta
https://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=home%3Aesphen&package=wsta
I'm working on getting more distributions, as well as 32-bit into the Open Build Service pipeline, which is what creates the releases on that page. For now, you need a 64-bit system to use that page. If you don't use a 64-bit system, have a look below at binaries or compiling it yourself.
wsta can be found in the Gentoo portage tree as dev-util/wsta. In order to
install it, simply run the following command.
emerge dev-util/wsta
To install on Max OS X, ensure you have homebrew installed, then run the following commands. It's going to take a while, please be patient.
brew tap esphen/wsta https://github.com/esphen/wsta.git
brew install wsta
You can also find binary releases on the releases page.
I only provide so many Linux distros on OBS, and only 64-bit versions. If your
computer does not fit into the distros provided, then have a look at the
download section of the most recent release, and place the attached binary into
your $PATH.
https://github.com/esphen/wsta/releases
Windows binaries are compiled for each release. Ensure you have a command
prompt with GNU libraries, for example the git prompt, and run the provided
binary file from there.
You can find binary releases on the releases page.
DON'T PANIC. It's really easy to compile and install wsta yourself! Rust
provides solid tools like cargo for automating the compilation. If you compile
wsta yourself, it should run on all of
rust's supported platforms.
# Install the rust language and tools
curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
# Install gcc and OpenSSL on your OS
dnf install -y gcc openssl-devel
# Install wsta to `$HOME/.cargo` or `$CARGO_HOME` if set.
# To change the install path, try setting --root to a directory like /usr/local
cargo install --git https://github.com/esphen/wsta.git
Install the rust language and tools.
curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
Run the program
cargo run -- -vvv -I -e ws://echo.websocket.org
In order to generate the man page, groff is needed
make man
If updates to the man page are done, remember to generate the markdown manual afterwards
make wsta.md