NAME

Net::EPP::Client - a client library for the TLS transport <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5734.html> of the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/std69>.

SYNOPSIS

        #!/usr/bin/perl
        use Net::EPP::Client;
        use strict;
        my $epp = Net::EPP::Client->new('host'  => 'epp.nic.tld');
        my $greeting = $epp->connect;
        $epp->send_frame('login.xml');
        my $answer = $epp->get_frame;
        my $answer = $epp->request('<epp><logout /></epp>');

DESCRIPTION

RFC 5743 <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5734.html> defines a TCP- (and TLS-) based transport model for EPP, and this module implements a client for that model. You can establish and manage EPP connections and send and receive responses over this connection.

"Net::EPP::Client" is a low-level EPP client. If you are writing applications, you should use Net::EPP::Simple instead.

CONSTRUCTOR

        my $epp = Net::EPP::Client->new(%PARAMS);

The constructor method creates a new EPP client object. It accepts a number of parameters:

"host"
MANDATORY. Specifies the computer to connect to. This may be a DNS hostname or an IP address. If a hostname is provided, IPv6 will be used if available.
"port"
OPTIONAL. Specifies the TCP port to connect to. This defaults to 700.
"ssl"
OPTIONAL. If the value of this parameter is false, then a plaintext connection will be created. Otherwise, IO::Socket::SSL will be used to provide an encrypted connection.
"frames"
DEPRECATED. If the value of this parameter is false, then the request() and get_frame() methods (see below) will return strings instead of "Net::EPP::Frame::Response" objects.

METHODS

CONNECTING TO A SERVER

        my $greeting = $epp->connect(%PARAMS);

This method establishes the TCP connection. You can use the %PARAMS hash to specify arguments that will be passed on to the constructors for IO::Socket::IP (such as a timeout) or IO::Socket::SSL (such as certificate information). Which of these modules will be used is determined by the "ssl" parameter that was provided when instantiating the object. See the relevant manpage for examples.

This method will croak() if connection fails, so be sure to use eval() if you want to catch the error.

By default, the return value for connect() will be the EPP <greeting> frame returned by the server. Please note that the same caveat about blocking applies to this method as to get_frame() (see below).

If you want to get the greeting yourself, set $params{no_greeting} to 1.

If TLS is enabled, then you can use %params to configure a client certificate and/or server certificate validation behaviour.

COMMUNICATING WITH THE SERVER

        my $answer = $epp->request($question);

This is a simple wrapper around get_frame() and send_frame() (see below). This method accepts a "question" frame as an argument, sends it to the server, and then returns the next frame the server sends back.

GETTING A FRAME FROM THE SERVER

        my $frame = $epp->get_frame;

This method returns an EPP response frame from the server. This will be a Net::EPP::Frame::Response object unless the "frames" argument to the constructor was false, in which case it will be a string containing a blob of XML.

Important Note: this method will block your program until it receives the full frame from the server. That could be a bad thing for your program, so you might want to consider using the alarm() function to apply a timeout, like so:

        my $timeout = 10; # ten seconds
        eval {
                local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm\n" };
                alarm($timeout);
                my $frame = $epp->get_frame;
                alarm(0);
        };
        if ($@ ne '') {
                alarm(0);
                print "timed out\n";
        }

If the connection to the server closes before the response can be received, or the server returned a mal-formed frame, this method will croak().

SENDING A FRAME TO THE SERVER

        $epp->send_frame($frame);

This sends a request frame to the server. $frame may be one of:

a scalar containing XML
a scalar containing a filename
an XML::LibXML::Document object (or an instance of a subclass)
an XML::DOM::Document object (or an instance of a subclass)

DISCONNECTING FROM THE SERVER

        $epp->disconnect;

This closes the connection. An EPP server should always close a connection after a <logout> frame has been received and acknowledged; this method is provided to allow you to clean up on the client side, or close the connection out of sync with the server.

    $connected = $epp->connected;

Returns a boolean if "Net::EPP::Simple" has a connection to the server. Note that this connection might have dropped, use ping() to test it.

    $socket = $epp->connection;

Returns the underlying socket.