Created by Stephen McDonald

Grillo is a terminal based chat server and client. It was originally written as an chat server entry for the Rosetta Code Project. It was then extended further into reusable threaded classes for the server and client, with command line options and some basic in-chat commands.

Grillo is named after the Italian phone of the same name, developed in 1965. They both share the common theme of being a very small communications device for their class, while being implemented with relatively basic technology.

Given that there are many richer and more powerful applications available for implementing the features Grillo provides, its best use at the least is to serve as a good example of how to do basic socket programming in Python, as well as a demonstrating some simple tricks for controlling threads.

Assuming you have setuptools installed, the easiest method is to install directly from pypi by running the following command:

$ easy_install -U grillo

Otherwise you can download Grillo and install it directly from source:

$ python setup.py install

Once installed, the command grillo should be available which can be used for starting a server, client, or both at once (the default):

$ grillo --bind host:port [--server-only|--client-only]

Note that the Grillo does not need to be installed in order to connect to a Grillo server, as the telnet command available on most modern systems can be used:

$ telnet host port