A little command line Web Socket client tool from Tyrus

The Tyrus project, the RI implementation of the Web Socket JSR, has a little sub project added by Pavel Bucek that provides a very useful command line testing tool. (Along with a couple of bug fixes of my own) This blog post gives a quick introduction.

To get hold of the tool at the moment you are going to have to do a little bit of work with svn and maven. So you need to check out the head of https://svn.java.net/svn/tyrus~source-code-repository/trunk and then perform a mvn package on the etc/client-cli sub project. Depending on the state of the maven repository you might need to do a mvn install -DskipTests=true on the root project first.

You can now find the executable jar in .../tyrus/ext/client-cli/target called something like tyrus-client-cli....jar. This has been shaded so it contains all of the required deps to run. Simples.

The tool currently allows you to send text and ping messages. It can receive binary messages but it just displays the hex values of up to the first 1024 bytes.

So you can either pass in the ws:// URL as the single command line argument or you can connect using the open command once the tool is running. Here are some very simple commands along with a response from a simple echo web socket service.

gdavison@gbr10460 ~]$ java -jar ~/software/tyrus-client-cli-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar ws://localhost:7101/Project1/echo
# Connecting to ws://localhost:7101/Project1/echo...
# Connected in session 689607b4-7bd8-465a-8d84-e0dca54fa3e8
session 6896...a3e8> 
session 6896...a3e8> send Hello!
# text-message: Message out Hello!
session 6896...a3e8> send
# End multiline message with . on own line
send...> Some
send...> Long
send...> Message
send...> .
# text-message: Message out Some
# Long
# Message
# 
session 6896...a3e8> close
# closed: CloseReason[1000,no reason given]
# Session closed
tyrus-client> quit


gdavison@gbr10460 ~]$ java -jar ~/software/tyrus-client-cli-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar 

tyrus-client> 
tyrus-client> open ws://localhost:7101/Project1/echo
# Connecting to ws://localhost:7101/Project1/echo...
# Connected in session 59e501a9-a793-4321-ba6a-1c73c13bd822
session 59e5...d822>
session 59e5...d822> ping
# pong-message
session 59e5...d822> help
# 
    open uri : open a connection to the web socket uri
    close : close a currently open web socket session
    send message : send a text message
    send : send a multiline text message teminated with a .
    ping : send a ping message
    quit | exit : exit this tool
    help : display this message
    
session 59e5...d822> 

I can see this being very helpful when trying to debug a web socket service and you want to remove the web browser out of the equation. It is implemented using JLine2 so it behaves like a native command line tool so is pleasant to use.