The Pyro Name Server is a tool to help keeping track of your objects in your network. It is also a means to give your Pyro objects logical names instead of the need to always know the exact object name (or id) and its location.
Pyro will name its objects like this:
PYRO:obj_dcf713ac20ce4fb2a6e72acaeba57dfd@localhost:51850
PYRO:custom_name@localhost:51851
It’s either a generated unique object id on a certain host, or a name you chose yourself. But to connect to these objects you’ll always need to know the exact object name or id and the exact hostname and port number of the Pyro daemon where the object is running. This can get tedious, and if you move servers around (or Pyro objects) your client programs can no longer connect to them until you update all URIs.
Enter the name server. This is a simple phone-book like registry that maps logical object names to their corresponding URIs. No need to remember the exact URI anymore. Instead, you can ask the name server to look it up for you. You only need to give it the logical object name.
Note
Usually you only need to run one single instance of the name server in your network. You can start multiple name servers but they are unconnected; you’ll end up with a partitioned name space.
Example scenario: Assume you’ve got a document archive server that publishes a Pyro object with several archival related methods in it. This archive server can register this object with the name server, using a logical name such as “Department.ArchiveServer”. Any client can now connect to it using only the name “Department.ArchiveServer”. They don’t need to know the exact Pyro id and don’t even need to know the location. This means you can move the archive server to another machine and as long as it updates its record in the name server, all clients won’t notice anything and can keep on running without modification.
The easiest way to start a name server is by using the command line tool.
synopsys: python -m Pyro4.naming [options]
Starts the Pyro Name Server. It can run without any arguments but there are several that you can use, for instance to control the hostname and port that the server is listening on. A short explanation of the available options can be printed with the help option. When it starts, it prints a message similar to this:
$ python -m Pyro4.naming -n neptune
Broadcast server running on 0.0.0.0:9091
NS running on neptune:9090 (192.168.1.100)
URI = PYRO:Pyro.NameServer@neptune:9090
As you can see it prints that it started a broadcast server (and its location), a name server (and its location), and it also printed the URI that clients can use to access it directly. These things will be explained below.
There are several command line options:
Print a short help message and exit.
Specify hostname or ip address to bind the server on. The default is localhost. If the server binds on localhost, no broadcast responder is started.
Specify port to bind server on (0=random).
Specify a Unix domain socket name to bind server on, rather than a normal TCP/IP socket.
Specify the hostname or ip address to bind the broadcast responder on. Note: if the hostname where the name server binds on is localhost (or 127.0.x.x), no broadcast responder is started.
Specify the port to bind the broadcast responder on (0=random).
Specify the external host name to use in case of NAT
Specify the external port use in case of NAT
Don’t start a broadcast responder.
Another way is doing it from within your own code. This is much more complex because you will have to integrate the name server into the rest of your program (perhaps you need to merge event loops). A helper function is available to create it in your program: Pyro4.naming.startNS(). Look at the eventloop example to see how you can use this.
There are a couple of config items related to the nameserver. They are used both by the name server itself (to configure the values it will use to start the server with), and the client code that locates the name server (to give it optional hints where the name server is located). Often these can be overridden with a command line option or with a method parameter in your code.
Configuration item | description |
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NS_HOST | the hostname or ip address of the name server |
NS_PORT | the port number of the name server |
NS_BCHOST | the hostname or ip address of the name server’s broadcast responder |
NS_BCPORT | the port number of the name server’s broadcast responder |
NATHOST | the external hostname in case of NAT |
NATPORT | the external port in case of NAT |
The name server control tool (or ‘nsc’) is used to talk to a running name server and perform diagnostic or maintenance actions such as querying the registered objects, adding or removing a name registration manually, etc.
synopsis: python -m Pyro4.nsc [options] command [arguments]
Print a short help message and exit.
Provide the hostname or ip address of the name server. The default is to do a broadcast lookup to search for a name server.
Provide the port of the name server, or its broadcast port if you’re doing a broadcast lookup.
Provide the Unix domain socket name of the name server, rather than a normal TCP/IP socket.
Print more output that could be useful.
The available commands for this tool are:
Example:
$ python -m Pyro4.nsc ping
Name server ping ok.
$ python -m Pyro4.nsc list Pyro
--------START LIST - prefix 'Pyro'
Pyro.NameServer --> PYRO:Pyro.NameServer@localhost:9090
--------END LIST - prefix 'Pyro'
The name server is a Pyro object itself, and you access it through a normal Pyro proxy. The object exposed is Pyro4.naming.NameServer. Getting a proxy for the name server is done using the following function: Pyro4.naming.locateNS() (also available as Pyro4.locateNS()).
By far the easiest way to locate the Pyro name server is by using the broadcast lookup mechanism. This goes like this: you simply ask Pyro to look up the name server and return a proxy for it. It automatically figures out where in your subnet it is running by doing a broadcast and returning the first Pyro name server that responds.
There is a config item BROADCAST_ADDRS that contains a comma separated list of the broadcast addresses Pyro should use when doing a broadcast lookup. Depending on your network configuration, you may have to change this list to make the lookup work. It could be that you have to add the network broadcast address for the specific network that the name server is located on.
Note
Broadcast lookup only works if you started a name server that didn’t bind on localhost. For instance, the name server started as an example in Starting the Name Server was told to bind on the host name ‘neptune’ and it started a broadcast responder as well. If you use the default host (localhost) no broadcast responder can be created.
Normally, all name server lookups are done this way. In code, it is simply calling the locator function without any arguments. If you want to circumvent the broadcast lookup (because you know the location of the server already, somehow) you can specify the hostname.
Get a proxy for a name server somewhere in the network. If you’re not providing host or port arguments, the configured defaults are used. Unless you specify a host, a broadcast lookup is done to search for a name server. (api reference: Pyro4.naming.locateNS())
Parameters: |
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To create a proxy and connect to a Pyro object, Pyro needs an URI so it can find the object. Because it is so convenient, the name server logic has been integrated into Pyro’s URI mechanism by means of the special PYRONAME protocol type (rather than the normal PYRO protocol type). This protocol type tells Pyro to treat the URI as a logical object name instead, and Pyro will do a name server lookup automatically to get the actual object’s URI. The form of a PYRONAME uri is very simple: PYRONAME:some_logical_object_name, where “some_logical_object_name” is the name of a registered Pyro object in the name server. This means that instead of manually resolving objects like this:
nameserver=Pyro4.locateNS()
uri=nameserver.lookup("Department.BackupServer")
proxy=Pyro4.Proxy(uri)
proxy.backup()
you can write this instead:
proxy=Pyro4.Proxy("PYRONAME:Department.BackupServer")
proxy.backup()
An additional benefit of using a PYRONAME uri in a proxy is that the proxy isn’t strictly tied to a specific object on a specific location. This is useful in scenarios where the server objects might move to another location, for instance when a disconnect/reconnect occurs. See the autoreconnect example for more details about this.
Note
Pyro has to do a lookup every time it needs to connect one of these PYRONAME uris. If you connect/disconnect many times or with many different objects, consider using PYRO uris (you can type them directly or create them by resolving as explained in the following paragraph) or call Pyro4.core.Proxy._pyroBind() on the proxy to bind it to a fixed PYRO uri instead.
‘Resolving an object name’ means to look it up in the name server’s registry and getting the actual URI that belongs to it (with the actual object name or id and the location of the daemon in which it is running). This is not normally needed in user code (Pyro takes care of it automatically for you), but it can still be useful in certain situations.
Resolving a logical name is usually done by getting a name server proxy and using the lookup method. This returns the URI object. You can also resolve a PYRONAME URI using the following utility function: Pyro4.naming.resolve() (also available as Pyro4.resolve()), which goes like this:
Finds a name server, and use that to resolve a PYRONAME uri into the direct PYRO uri pointing to the named object. If uri is already a PYRO uri, it is returned unmodified. Note: if you need to resolve more than a few names, consider using the name server directly instead of repeatedly calling this function, to avoid the name server lookup overhead from each call.
Parameters: | uri (string or Pyro4.core.URI) – PYRONAME uri that you want to resolve |
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