HTTP GET using plain sockets
Overview
The sockets/http_get sample application for Zephyr implements a simple HTTP GET client using a BSD Sockets compatible API. The purpose of this sample is to show how it’s possible to develop a sockets application portable to both POSIX and Zephyr. As such, it is kept minimal and supports only IPv4.
The source code for this sample application can be found at: samples/net/sockets/http_get.
Requirements
or, a board with hardware networking
NAT/routing should be set up to allow connections to the Internet
DNS server should be available on the host to resolve domain names
Building and Running
Build the Zephyr version of the application like this:
west build -b <board_to_use> samples/net/sockets/http_get
After the sample starts, it issues HTTP GET request to “google.com:80” and dumps the response. You can edit the source code to issue a request to any other site on the Internet (or on the local network, in which case no NAT/routing setup is needed). Exit QEMU by pressing CTRL+A x.
Enabling TLS support
Enable TLS support in the sample by building the project with the
overlay-tls.conf overlay file enabled, for example, using these commands:
west build -b qemu_x86 samples/net/sockets/http_get -- -DCONF_FILE="prj.conf overlay-tls.conf"
An alternative way is to specify -DEXTRA_CONF_FILE=overlay-tls.conf when
running west build or cmake.
For boards that support TLS offloading (e.g. TI’s cc3220sf_launchxl), use
overlay-tls-offload.conf instead of overlay-tls.conf.
The certificate used by the sample can be found in the sample’s src
directory. The certificate was selected to enable access to the default website
configured in the sample (https://google.com). To access a different web page
over TLS, provide an appropriate certificate to authenticate to that web server.
Note, that TLS support in the sample depends on non-posix, TLS socket functionality. Therefore, it is only possible to run TLS in this sample on Zephyr.
Wi-Fi
The IPv4 Wi-Fi support can be enabled in the sample with Wi-Fi snippet.
Running application on POSIX Host
The same application source code can be built for a POSIX system, e.g. Linux. (Note: if you look at the source, you will see that the code is the same except the header files are different for Zephyr vs POSIX.)
To build:
$ make -f Makefile.host
To run:
$ ./http_get
As can be seen, the behavior of the application is the same as the Zephyr version.