I would like to enhance libcurl to support HTTP client connections to
unix domain sockets.

This was briefly discussed some time ago [1].

There are several services that have HTTP servers listening on unix
sockets. Examples are OpenWBEM, OpenPegasus, and xend. Some clients of
these servers use libcurl. Often these servers listen for HTTPS
connections on TCP ports, and HTTP connections on unix sockets. When
connecting to localhost, it is very desirable to eliminate the SSL
overhead by connecting HTTP to the unix socket instead of HTTPS to the
local port.

In order to add this enhancement to libcurl, we need to determine how to
encode the path to the unix socket in an HTTP URL. Or, if this doesn't
seem feasible, we need some other way to tell libcurl the path to the
unix socket. I have been unable to find a standard or convention for
encoding a unix socket path in an HTTP URL.

Thoughts?

[1] http://curl.haxx.se/mail/lib-2006-02/0019.html
Received on 2008-04-11