Hello!

On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 7:00 PM, develephant.net wrote:
> I've been reading through the docs and examples, and I can't seem to fully
> wrap my head around how a socket server would work with OpenResty being HTTP
> based on nginx.
>

Yes, OpenResty has been focusing on HTTP. But there has been a plan to
add support for pure TCP downstream. bigplum in the community has done
some attempts like this:

    https://github.com/bigplum/nginx-tcp-lua-module

And I'm going to integrate such a ngx_tcp_lua module into OpenResty soon.

In the meantime, you can use websockets as a work-around, just as
Brian Akins has pointed out :)

> From what I have seen so far I assume something like this:
>
[...]
>
> Now I know that's not a realistic app, but I am wondering if that's the
> general direction.

Yes, it is the supposed way of running the server. It is also demonstrated here:

    http://openresty.org/#Samples

>  Most importantly, how does this work in a non web based
> environment?  I would be connecting with luasocket from a Lua mobile client
> to the OpenResty app instance, not through a web client.

If you mean using OpenResty to write a standalone console-based client
program, then we'll have a "ngxlua" utility program in OpenResty soon.
You'll be able to run non-server programs like this:

    $ ngxlua myclient.lua

And no ports and no socket files will be listened.

> I also would like
> to keep all functionality in external Lua files as opposed to the config
> file.
>

For servers not based on the upcoming "ngxlua" utility mentioned
above, it requires and will still require a configuration file. You
can have a fixed configuration file for your app, just like
PHP/Python/Perl/Ruby web apps often have a relatively fixed nginx
configuration file. We can add support for pure Lua configuration
files to nginx in the future. But it is still a configuration file.

Best regards,
-agentzh

Hello!

On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 1:27 PM, C Byerley wrote:
>
> My goal is to connect a Corona SDK ( Lua ) client, which has luasocket
> built-in to an OpenResty instance and create a full-duplex socket
> connection.  Can this be done with websockets?
>

WebSocket is a full duplex protocol. All you need is a websocket
framing support in both the client and the server. The
lua-resty-websocket library provides the support in OpenResty:

    https://github.com/agentzh/lua-resty-websocket

> Also, I was unclear about the config file.  In regards to using only lua
> files, I see that this can be done with the content_by_lua_file, so that's
> perfect. :)
>

Right. content_by_lua_file is all you need.

Regards,
-agentzh