RPC over UDP may seem like a silly idea, but things like the DHT Kademlia require it. This project is specifically designed for asynchronous Python Twisted code to accept and send remote proceedure calls.

Because of the use of UDP, you will not always know whether or not a procedure call was successfully received. This isn't considered an exception state in the library, though you will know if a response isn't received by the server in a configurable amount of time.

pip install rpcudp

This assumes you have a working familiarity with Twisted.

First, let's make a server that accepts a remote procedure call and spin it up.

from rpcudp.protocol import RPCProtocol
from twisted.internet import reactor

class RPCServer(RPCProtocol):
    # Any methods starting with "rpc_" are available to clients.
    def rpc_sayhi(self, sender, name):
        # This could return a Deferred as well. sender is (ip,port)
        return "Hello %s you live at %s:%i" % (name, sender[0], sender[1])

# start a server on UDP port 1234
reactor.listenUDP(1234, RPCServer())
reactor.run()

Now, let's make a client. Note that we do need to specify a port for the client as well, since it needs to listen for responses to RPC calls on a UDP port.

from rpcudp.protocol import RPCProtocol
from twisted.internet import reactor

class RPCClient(RPCProtocol):
    def handleResult(self, result):
    	# result will be a tuple - first arg is a boolean indicating whether a response
        # was received, and the second argument is the response if one was received.
        if result[0]:
            print "Success! %s" % result[1]
        else:
            print "Response not received."

client = RPCClient()
reactor.listenUDP(5678, client)
client.sayhi(('127.0.0.1', 1234), "Snake Plissken").addCallback(client.handleResult)
reactor.run()

You can run this example in the example.py file in the root folder.

The protocol is designed to be as small and fast as possible. Python objects are serialized using MsgPack. All calls must fit within 8K (generally small enough to fit in one datagram packet).

With version 2.0 compatibility is broken with previous versions. In version 2.0 the method name when making a remote call is always packed as a unicode string. In previous versions, the type of string that method name was depended on the Python version. In order to make instances running on Python 2 and Python 3 compatible with each other the method name is now encoded as a unicode string before being packed, which ensures that u-msgpack-python will always pack the it the same way. See u-msgpack-python#behaviour-notes for more information.

If you intend to have instances running on both Python 2 and Python 3 communicating with each other make sure that all strings in the arguments you send are unicode encoded as well to ensure compatibility.