In deployed environments, I often come across two Ruby application servers - Unicorn, and Puma. These servers are usually configured to listen on a UNIX socket file, usually located in the tmp/sockets directory of a Capistrano install, e.g. /home/deploy/appname/shared/tmp/sockets/appname.sock.

It’s quite often useful to be able to connect to a UNIX socket to see if the application server is behaving correctly, especially if the instance is not accessible via a public IP address. A little-known feature of the curl command line is that it accepts a --unix-socket argument to send requests to. This allows application servers and any other process that listens on a socket and supports HTTP to be tested easily with a command like:

curl --unix-socket=/home/deploy/appname/shared/tmp/sockets/appname.sock
http://localhost/my-application-route-goes-here

All the usual features of cURL are available when the UNIX file is provided, such as making POST/HEAD/OPTIONS/anything else requests, sending form data or files, and using cookies.

I’ve found that this technique is very handy for diagnosing problems that lie between the web/proxy server (usually Nginx), and the application itself.