Trouble Sending HTTP Requests to Port 443 (HTTPS) using Sockets.jl

General Usage
,
1

Trying to send HTTP requests using the Sockets.jl package. It works on port 80 say for “example.com” but any attempt to contact a server at port 443 (HTTPS) I’m met with a - 400 Bad Request - The plain HTTP request was sent to HTTPS port. I’m kind a network security n00b but I suspect there’s some SSL handshake that needs to happen under the hood and I don’t see how to inspect that, if that’s even the problem. Example code below with subsequent error…

using Sockets

conn = connect("git-scm.com",443)

@async while isopen(conn)
    write(stdout, read(conn, Char))
end

query = "GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: git-scm.com
Accept: text/html

"
write(conn,query)

julia> HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Server: cloudflare
Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2023 14:27:43 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 253
Xonnection: close
CF-RAY: -
Connection: Keep-Alive

<html>
<head><title>400 The plain HTTP request was sent to HTTPS port</title></head>
<body>
<center><h1>400 Bad Request</h1></center>
<center>The plain HTTP request was sent to HTTPS port</center>
<hr><center>cloudflare</center>
</body>
</html>
2

Have you tried OpenSSL.jl or MbedTLS.jl ?

3

I’ve been looking at MBedTLS.jl while making this post, but are we saying that the Sockets.jl package can’t handle this use case on its own? No problem if so, but I wanted to probe the community to see if that’s the case and to understand a solution otherwise if it can be handled natively.

Thank you for the response btw! Hope to hear more from you and others!

4

Writing a native TLS encryption would be too much work. For now using and building over already battle tested available packages from other languages is a safe bet.

5

I’d recommend using HTTP.jl. The Sockets stdlib is just a literal socket library for TCP/UDP/other sockets. HTTP/S is a protocol, it per se is unrelated to sockets.

1 Like
6

If one needs to use allocation free persistent communication, HTTP.jl would not be much of a help there, one would need to use Sockets, unsafe_write (with this modification) to avoid allocation in the hot loop.

7

Ok, but for the simple case of “use HTTPS to connect to a webserver”, HTTP.jl is perfectly fine.

1 Like