Node Cookbook - Third Edition

Unix sockets

The net module also allows us to communicate across Unix sockets. These are special files that can be placed on the filesystem.

All we have to do is listen on, and connect to a file path instead of a port number and hostname.

In client.js, we modify the following:

const socket = net.connect(1337, 'localhost') 

To this:

const socket = net.connect('/tmp/my.socket') 

The last line of server.js looks like so:

}).listen(1337, 'localhost') 

We simply change it to the following:

}).listen('/tmp/my.socket') 

Now our client and server can talk over a Unix socket instead of the network.

IPCUnix sockets are primarily useful for low-level Inter Process Communication (IPC); however, for general IPC needs, the child_process module supplies ...