[Httplib2-discuss] Need to specify IP address for client socket (or provide custom HTTPConnection)

[Simon W. <si...@si...>]

Hi all,

Had an interesting edge case come up today. I'm talking to a web
service from a machine with two public-facing IP addresses. The web
service in question is configured to only allow requests from one of
them, so I need to be able to force my request to come from a specific
IP address.

After much research, it appears that the way to do this is to call the
.bind() method on the socket object directly after it is created:

self.sock = socket.socket(af, socktype, proto)
self.sock.bind((required_ip_address, 0))

Using 0 for the port number tells the operating system to pick an
available port.

Unfortunately httplib2 doesn't currently provide a hook for
substituting in a custom HTTPConnection implementation - it is hard
coded to pick between HTTPConnectionWithTimeout and
HTTPSConnectionWithTimeout. It would be really useful if there was a
way to provide a custom HTTPConnection - in my case, I'd provide one
that knows how to bind to a specified client socket IP address.
Alternatively, adding direct support for my use case to the httplib2
library would be useful.

Cheers,

Simon