ndog

Ndog is like Ncat, but friendlier! It is a networking multitool that can act as a client or server for a number of network schemes/protocols.

⚠️ This project is under active development and is subject to major breaking changes prior to the 1.0 release.

Features/goals (unchecked boxes have not been implemented yet):

• Composability with other UNIX-philosophy tools
  • Streams multiplexed over STDIN/STDOUT
  • Spawn subprocesses to handle individual streams (--exec)
• Listening (act like a server)
• Connecting (act like a client)
• Proxying (bridge listen and connect)
• Support for many more schemes/protocols than just TCP and UDP
  • TCP
  • UDP
  • HTTP
  • WebSockets
  • PostgreSQL
  • SSH
  • QUIC
  • GraphQL
  • More schemes TBD!
• Support for TLS
• Interactive terminal user interface
  • Autocomplete per scheme/protocol
• Recording and playback with pattern matching

Concepts

Ndog represents all schemes using streams, which are bidirectional (duplex) byte streams. Streams can be multiplexed together (e.g. when listening with no --exec), or handled individually (e.g. by an --exec subprocess).

Context	Read	Write
Listen	Data from client (request)	Data to client (response)
Connect	Data from server (response)	Data to server (request)

Schemes

Scheme	Stream per	Default representation
tcp	TCP connection	Raw data
udp	UDP remote address	Raw data
ws	WebSocket	Raw data
http	HTTP request	Request/response body
postgresql, postgres	PostgreSQL connection	SQL statements/row CSV

Examples

Description	Incantation
Start a TCP server on port 8000, all interfaces	ndog -l tcp://:8000
Start a UDP server on port 8125, localhost	ndog -l udp://localhost:8125
Start an HTTP server on port 8080, all interfaces	ndog -l http://:8080
Serve current directory file system over HTTP server	ndog -l http://localhost:8080 -o serve_file=.
Connect to a TCP server on port 8000, localhost	ndog -c tcp://localhost:8000
Connect to a UDP server on port 8125, localhost	ndog -c udp://localhost:8000