TCP Socket Programming

Coming Soon

This lesson will teach you how to work with raw TCP sockets in Erlang to build the network layer of your chat server. You’ll learn how to:

• Create TCP listeners and accept incoming connections
• Handle multiple concurrent client connections
• Implement message framing and parsing
• Build connection management and cleanup
• Handle network errors and disconnections

What You’ll Build

By the end of this lesson, you’ll have implemented:

• A TCP server that accepts multiple client connections
• Connection pooling and management
• Message parsing and routing
• Network error handling and recovery
• The foundation for your chat server’s network layer

Key Concepts Preview

% TCP server setup
start_server(Port) ->
    {ok, Listen} = gen_tcp:listen(Port, [binary, {packet, 0}, {active, false}]),
    accept_loop(Listen).

accept_loop(Listen) ->
    {ok, Socket} = gen_tcp:accept(Listen),
    spawn(fun() -> handle_client(Socket) end),
    accept_loop(Listen).

This lesson builds on the supervision patterns from Lesson 12 and prepares you for the HTTP request handling we’ll explore in Lesson 14.

This lesson is currently under development. Check back soon for the complete content!