# Websockets

Websockets start as a GET request that can either be upgraded to a websocket via a 101, switching protocols, response or any other response. The choice of what to do, or how to respond, is often not possible in other frameworks and is one of the motivating aims in Quart. In addition as websockets are very similar to requests, Quart aims to have analogues functionality between websockets and requests.

## Request analogues

Websockets are very similar to GET requests, to the extent that is was tempting to simply extend the Flask request API to include websocket functionality. This would likely cause surprise to users of Flask-Sockets or Flask-SocketIO which set the de-facto Flask standard. Therefore I decided to introduce the websocket functionality alongside the existing request functionality.

As websockets are so similar to GET requests it makes sense to produce an analogue for all the functionality available for requests. For example. `before_request()` and `before_websocket()` and there is a websocket context alongside the request context.

## Response or Upgrade

The utility of being able to choose how to respond, or whether to upgrade, is best shown when considering authentication. In the example below a typical login_required decorator can be used to prevent unauthorised usage of the websocket.

    def login_required(func):
        @wraps(func)
        async def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
            if websocket.authentication == (...):
                return await func(*args, **kwargs)
            else:
                abort(401)
        return wrapper

    @app.websocket('/ws')
    @login_required
    async def ws():
        while True:
            await websocket.receive()
            ...

Quart also allows for the acceptance response (101) to be manually sent via `accept()` as this gives the framework user full control.

Note

This functionality is only useable with ASGI servers that implement the `Websocket Denial Response` extension. If the server does not support this extension Quart will instruct the server to close the connection without a response. Hypercorn, the recommended ASGI server, supports this extension.