== Connection
This chapter describes how to open, monitor and close
a connection using the Gun client.
=== Gun connections
Gun is designed with the SPDY and Websocket protocols in mind.
They are built for long-running connections that allow concurrent
exchange of data, either in the form of request/responses for
SPDY or in the form of messages for Websocket.
A Gun connection is an Erlang process that manages a socket to
a remote endpoint. This Gun connection is owned by a user
process that is called the _owner_ of the connection, and is
managed by the supervision tree of the `gun` application.
The owner process communicates with the Gun connection
by calling functions from the module `gun`. All functions
perform their respective operations asynchronously. The Gun
connection will send Erlang messages to the owner process
whenever needed.
When the remote endpoint closes the connection, Gun attempts
to reconnect automatically.
=== Opening a new connection
The `gun:open/{2,3}` function must be used to open a connection.
.Opening a connection to example.org on port 443
[source,erlang]
{ok, ConnPid} = gun:open("example.org", 443).
If the port given is 443, Gun will attempt to connect using
SSL. The protocol will be selected automatically using the
NPN extension for TLS. By default Gun supports SPDY/3.1,
SPDY/3 and HTTP/1.1 when connecting using SSL.
For any other port, Gun will attempt to connect using TCP
and will use the HTTP/1.1 protocol.
The transport and protocol used can be overriden using
options. The manual documents all available options.
Options can be provided as a third argument, and take the
form of a map.
.Opening an SSL connection to example.org on port 8443
[source,erlang]
{ok, ConnPid} = gun:open("example.org", 8443, #{transport=>ssl}).
=== Waiting for the connection to be established
When Gun successfully connects to the server, it sends a
`gun_up` message with the protocol that has been selected
for the connection.
Gun provides the functions `gun:await_up/{1,2,3}` that wait
for the `gun_up` message. They can optionally take a monitor
reference and/or timeout value. If no monitor is provided,
one will be created for the duration of the function call.
.Synchronous opening of a connection
[source,erlang]
{ok, ConnPid} = gun:open("example.org", 443),
{ok, Protocol} = gun:await_up(ConnPid).
=== Handling connection loss
When the connection is lost, Gun will send a `gun_down`
message indicating the current protocol, the reason the
connection was lost and two list of stream references.
The first list indicates open streams that _may_ have been
processed by the server. The second list indicates open
streams that the server did not process.
=== Monitoring the connection process
@todo Gun should detect the owner process being killed
Because software errors are unavoidable, it is important to
detect when the Gun process crashes. It is also important
to detect when it exits normally. Erlang provides two ways
to do that: links and monitors.
Gun leaves you the choice as to which one will be used.
However, if you use the `gun:await/{2,3}` or `gun:await_body/{2,3}`
functions, a monitor may be used for you to avoid getting
stuck waiting for a message that will never come.
If you choose to monitor yourself you can do it on a permanent
basis rather than on every message you will receive, saving
resources. Indeed, the `gun:await/{3,4}` and `gun:await_body/{3,4}`
functions both accept a monitor argument if you have one already.
.Monitoring the connection process
[source,erlang]
{ok, ConnPid} = gun:open("example.org", 443).
MRef = monitor(process, ConnPid).
This monitor reference can be kept and used until the connection
process exits.
.Handling `DOWN` messages
[source,erlang]
receive
%% Receive Gun messages here...
{'DOWN', Mref, process, ConnPid, Reason} ->
error_logger:error_msg("Oops!"),
exit(Reason);
end.
What to do when you receive a `DOWN` message is entirely up to you.
=== Closing the connection abruptly
The connection can be stopped abruptly at any time by calling
the `gun:close/1` function.
.Immediate closing of the connection
[source,erlang]
gun:close(ConnPid).
The process is stopped immediately without having a chance to
perform the protocol's closing handshake, if any.
=== Closing the connection gracefully
The connection can also be stopped gracefully by calling the
`gun:shutdown/1` function.
.Graceful shutdown of the connection
[source,erlang]
gun:shutdown(ConnPid).
Gun will refuse any new requests or messages after you call
this function. It will however continue to send you messages
for existing streams until they are all completed.
For example if you performed a GET request just before calling
`gun:shutdown/1`, you will still receive the response before
Gun closes the connection.
If you set a monitor beforehand, you will receive a message
when the connection has been closed.
