Zig cookbook

UDP Echo

Similar to the TCP server example, this program will listen on the specified IP address and port, but for UDP datagrams this time. If data is received, it will be echoed back to the sender's address.

Although std.net is mostly focused on abstractions for TCP (so far), we can still make use of socket programming to communicate via UDP.

//! Start a UDP echo on an unused port.
//!
//! Test with
//! echo "hello zig" | nc -u localhost <port>

const std = @import("std");
const net = std.net;
const posix = std.posix;
const print = std.debug.print;

pub fn main() !void {
    // adjust the ip/port here as needed
    const addr = try net.Address.parseIp("127.0.0.1", 32100);

    // get a socket and set domain, type and protocol flags
    const sock = try posix.socket(
        posix.AF.INET,
        posix.SOCK.DGRAM,
        posix.IPPROTO.UDP,
    );

    // for completeness, we defer closing the socket. In practice, if this is
    // a one-shot program, we could omit this and let the OS do the cleanup
    defer posix.close(sock);

    try posix.bind(sock, &addr.any, addr.getOsSockLen());

    var other_addr: posix.sockaddr = undefined;
    var other_addrlen: posix.socklen_t = @sizeOf(posix.sockaddr);

    var buf: [1024]u8 = undefined;

    print("Listen on {any}...\n", .{addr});

    // we did not set the NONBLOCK flag (socket type flag),
    // so the program will wait until data is received
    const n_recv = try posix.recvfrom(
        sock,
        buf[0..],
        0,
        &other_addr,
        &other_addrlen,
    );
    print(
        "received {d} byte(s) from {any};\n    string: {s}\n",
        .{ n_recv, other_addr, buf[0..n_recv] },
    );

    // we could extract the source address of the received data by
    // parsing the other_addr.data field

    const n_sent = try posix.sendto(
        sock,
        buf[0..n_recv],
        0,
        &other_addr,
        other_addrlen,
    );
    print("echoed {d} byte(s) back\n", .{n_sent});
}

After starting the program, test as follows with nc, using the -u flag for UDP:

echo "hello zig" | nc -u localhost <port>