Networking, Part 6: Creating a UDP server

How do I create a UDP server?

There are a variety of function calls available to send UDP sockets. We will use the newer getaddrinfo to help set up a socket structure.

Remember that UDP is a simple packet-based ('data-gram') protocol ; there is no connection to set up between the two hosts.

First, initialize the hints addrinfo struct to request an IPv6, passive datagram socket.

memset(&hints, 0, sizeof(hints));
hints.ai_family = AF_INET6; // use AF_INET instead for IPv4
hints.ai_socktype =  SOCK_DGRAM;
hints.ai_flags =  AI_PASSIVE;

Next, use getaddrinfo to specify the port number (we don't need to specify a host as we are creating a server socket, not sending a packet to a remote host).

getaddrinfo(NULL, "300", &hints, &res);

sockfd = socket(res->ai_family, res->ai_socktype, res->ai_protocol);
bind(sockfd, res->ai_addr, res->ai_addrlen);

The port number is <1024, so the program will need root privileges. We could have also specified a service name instead of a numeric port value.

So far the calls have been similar to a TCP server. For a stream-based service we would call listen and accept. For our UDP-serve we can just start waiting for the arrival of a packet on the socket-

struct sockaddr_storage addr;
int addrlen = sizeof(addr);

// ssize_t recvfrom(int socket, void* buffer, size_t buflen, int flags, struct sockaddr *addr, socklen_t * address_len);

byte_count = recvfrom(sockfd, buf, sizeof(buf), 0, &addr, &addrlen);

The addr struct will hold sender (source) information about the arriving packet. Note the sockaddr_storage type is a sufficiently large enough to hold all possible types of socket addresses (e.g. IPv4, IPv6 and other socket types).

Full Code

#include <string.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/socket.h>
#include <netdb.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <arpa/inet.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    int s;

    struct addrinfo hints, *res;
    memset(&hints, 0, sizeof(hints));
    hints.ai_family = AF_INET6; // INET for IPv4
    hints.ai_socktype =  SOCK_DGRAM;
    hints.ai_flags =  AI_PASSIVE;

    getaddrinfo(NULL, "300", &hints, &res);

    int sockfd = socket(res->ai_family, res->ai_socktype, res->ai_protocol);

    if (bind(sockfd, res->ai_addr, res->ai_addrlen) != 0) {
        perror("bind()");
        exit(1);
    }
    struct sockaddr_storage addr;
    int addrlen = sizeof(addr);

    while(1){
        char buf[1024];
        ssize_t byte_count = recvfrom(sockfd, buf, sizeof(buf), 0, &addr, &addrlen);
        buf[byte_count] = '\0';

        printf("Read %d chars\n", byte_count);
        printf("===\n");
        printf("%s\n", buf);
    }

    return 0;
}