How do you UDP multicast in Python?

Question

How do you send and receive UDP multicast in Python? Is there a standard library to do so?

Answer 1

This works for me:

Receive

import socket
import struct

MCAST_GRP = '224.1.1.1'
MCAST_PORT = 5007
IS_ALL_GROUPS = True

sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM, socket.IPPROTO_UDP)
sock.setsockopt(socket.SOL_SOCKET, socket.SO_REUSEADDR, 1)
if IS_ALL_GROUPS:
    # on this port, receives ALL multicast groups
    sock.bind(('', MCAST_PORT))
else:
    # on this port, listen ONLY to MCAST_GRP
    sock.bind((MCAST_GRP, MCAST_PORT))
mreq = struct.pack("4sl", socket.inet_aton(MCAST_GRP), socket.INADDR_ANY)

sock.setsockopt(socket.IPPROTO_IP, socket.IP_ADD_MEMBERSHIP, mreq)

while True:
  # For Python 3, change next line to "print(sock.recv(10240))"
  print sock.recv(10240)

Send

import socket

MCAST_GRP = '224.1.1.1'
MCAST_PORT = 5007
# regarding socket.IP_MULTICAST_TTL
# ---------------------------------
# for all packets sent, after two hops on the network the packet will not 
# be re-sent/broadcast (see https://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Multicast-HOWTO-6.html)
MULTICAST_TTL = 2

sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM, socket.IPPROTO_UDP)
sock.setsockopt(socket.IPPROTO_IP, socket.IP_MULTICAST_TTL, MULTICAST_TTL)

# For Python 3, change next line to 'sock.sendto(b"robot", ...' to avoid the
# "bytes-like object is required" msg (https://stackoverflow.com/a/42612820)
sock.sendto("robot", (MCAST_GRP, MCAST_PORT))

It is based off the examples from http://wiki.python.org/moin/UdpCommunication which didn't work.

My system is... Linux 2.6.31-15-generic #50-Ubuntu SMP Tue Nov 10 14:54:29 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux Python 2.6.4