ESP Client in Rust

• What: This is an ESP client¹ implementation in Rust.
• Why: Practice some basic Rust socket programming.
• How: Using standard Rust libraries for socket connection and some others.

Installing

With cargo on your system, you can install espclient directly from the repo as follows:

$ cargo install --git https://github.com/mbari-org/espclient.git

Of course, you can also clone this repo and then run tests, run the program, build, etc.:

$ cargo test
   Compiling espclient v...
    Finished test [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.97s
     Running target/debug/deps/espclient-134c8ea5e5ff6ed0

running 2 tests
test encoder::tests::encode_line_tests ... ok
test decoder::tests::unfinished_line ... ok

test result: ok. 2 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured; 0 filtered out; finished in 0.00s

Common commands I run here (see justfile):

just test
just clippy
just format
just release
just install
just outdated
just update

Running

Have an ESP server running somewhere and then launch the program indicating the corresponding host:port, for example: espclient bufflehead.shore.mbari.org:7777 (see below).

Program usage:

$ espclient --help
ESP Client in Rust

Usage: espclient [OPTIONS] <SERVER>

Arguments:
  <SERVER>  host:port indicating the running ESP server to connect to

Options:
  -n, --name <NAME>  My name as client for ESP server's log [default: espclient.rs]
  -c, --cmd <CMD>    Command beginning interactive session [default: "showlog 0"]
  -s, --simple       Simple output (by default, show stream multiplexing explicitly)
  -d, --debug        Summarize raw socket traffic on STDERR
  -h, --help         Print help
  -V, --version      Print version

---

See a quick demo here.

Change log

• 2025-02: maintenance update
• 2023-10: rustyline updated
• 2023-06: just some dep updates
• 2022-11-13: do various dep updates and set 2021 edition
• 2022-09-17: fix #1 to address critical dependabot notification
• 2022-01-27: general updates
• 2022-01-05: enable ci; fix clippy error
• 2021-04-20: enable colored CLI
• 2020-08-19: various adjustments incl improved/simplified prompt handling.
• 2020-08-18: initial functional version

Some refs

• https://blog.burntsushi.net/rust-error-handling/#the-error-trait
• https://github.com/jtenner/telnet_codec

Footnotes

1. Similar to the "espclient" program that is part of the MBARI Environmental Sample Processor system. ↩