urllib/urllib2 support for specifying ip address

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 7:22 PM, Robin Becker <robin at reportlab.com> wrote:
> I want to run torture tests against an https server on domain A; I have
> configured apache on the server to respond to a specific hostname ipaddress.
>
> I don't want to torture the live server so I have set up an alternate
> instance on a different ip address.

Since you mention urllib2, I'm assuming this is Python 2.x, not 3.x.
The exact version may be significant.

Can you simply query the server by IP address rather than host name?
According to the docs, urllib2.urlopen() doesn't check the
certificate, so it should be accepted. Or does the server insist on
the hostname being correct?

Failing that, you could monkey-patch socket.create_connection, which
seems to be the thing that ultimately does the work. Something like
this:

import socket.
orig_create_connection = socket.create_connection
def create_connection(address, *args, **kwargs):
    if address == "domainA": address = "1.2.3.4"
    return orig_create_connection(address, *args, **kwargs)
socket.create_connection = create_connection
# Proceed to use urllib2.urlopen()

Untested, but may do what you want.

Normally, though, I'd look at just changing the hosts file, if at all
possible. You're right that it does change state for your whole
computer, but it's generally the easiest solution.

ChrisA