Using Node.js To Send A Heartbeat To A Python Server

I’ve been looking back at some old code and I found an old piece on using Perl to send a heartbeat to a Python server.

Recently I’ve been using the excellent node.js to do some cool JavaScript on the server side instead of in a client on a web broswer. I thought it would be fun to covert this simple script over to JavaScript.

This example is based on recipe 13.11 in the Python Cookbook.

The script needs to send a UDP datagram to a server listening on port 43278. In this example the server will be listening on localhost, 127.0.0.1.

As with the Perl script, we’ll set a few “constants” to let us change things easily if we want to. As JavaScript doesn’t have constants in this example we’ll just use variables. Firstly we nee to require “dgram” so we can use UDP datagrams. We’ll set the server ip address, the port to use, the time in seconds to send the heartbeat, a debug flag if we want to see a message on the console everytime we send a message, and the message itself “PyHB”.

var dgram = require('dgram');

var message = new Buffer("PyHB");

var server_ip = '127.0.0.1';

var server_port = 43278;

var beat_period = 5;

var debug = 1;

We’ll need to send out our heartbeat every beat_period seconds. To do this we can use JavaScript’s setInterval function to execute code every X milliseconds. As we’ve defined our beat_period in seconds, we’ll need to mulitply this value by 1000 to get the time in milliseconds.

setInterval(function() {

// datagram code goes here.

}, beat_period * 1000);

The code to send the datagram is really simple, 3 lines infact. We create a client socket, send the message then close the client socket.

var client = dgram.createSocket("udp4");

client.send(message, 0, message.length, server_port, server_ip);

client.close();

Putting this together, along with a bit of debugging information, we get the following code.

var dgram = require('dgram');

var message = new Buffer("PyHB");

var server_ip = '127.0.0.1';

var server_port = 43278;

var beat_period = 5;

var debug = 1;

console.log("Sending heartbeat to IP " + server_ip + " , port " + server_port);

console.log("press Ctrl-C to stop");

setInterval(function() {

var client = dgram.createSocket("udp4");

client.send(message, 0, message.length, server_port, server_ip);

client.close();

if (debug)

console.log("Time: " + new Date());

}, beat_period * 1000);

I hope that was a useful introduction to sending messages using UDP in Node.js.