How to allow ws:// instead of localhost:// for tornado

Question

I have the following basic tornado app:

import tornado.web

class IndexHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
    """Regular HTTP handler to serve the ping page"""
    def get(self):
        self.write("OK")

if __name__ == "__main__":

    app = tornado.web.Application([
    (r"/", IndexHandler), 
    ])
    app.listen(8000)
    print 'Listening on 0.0.0.0:8000'
    tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()

This will run on "http://localhost:8000". How would I get this to run and accept connections at ws://localhost:8000?

Answer 1

tornado.web.RequestHandler is used for accepting HTTP requests. For websockets, you need to use tornado.websocket.WebSocketHandler.

---

Another thing to note is that you can't visit a websocket url directly from the browser. That is, you can't type ws://localhost:8000 in the address bar and expect to connect to the websocket. That is not how websockets work.

A websocket connection is an upgrage connection. Which means, you first have to visit a url via HTTP and then use Javascript to upgrade to websocket.

See an example about how to connect to websocket using Javascript at Mozilla Web Docs.