vi/websocat

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

8673 stars · 327 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

websocat is a command-line tool for WebSockets, acting like netcat, curl, and socat for ws:// and wss:// connections. It supports both connecting to and serving WebSocket endpoints, with advanced features like proxying between TCP and WebSocket, broadcasting, auto-reconnect, and UNIX socket integration.

Use cases

• test a websocket server from the command line
• run a websocket echo server for debugging
• bridge a TCP connection over a websocket
• pipe stdin/stdout of a program to a websocket
• broadcast websocket messages between multiple clients
• debug browser devtools protocol over websocket
• connect to a websocket through a SOCKS5 proxy

When to choose

• you need a quick netcat-style tool for testing or scripting WebSocket connections
• you want to proxy or bridge TCP and WebSocket traffic from the shell
• you need a lightweight WebSocket server or client without writing code
• you want cross-platform prebuilt binaries for Linux, Windows, and macOS

When to avoid

• you need a WebSocket library to embed in an application rather than a CLI tool
• you need a GUI WebSocket client with saved request collections
• you need production-grade WebSocket load testing or monitoring at scale

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

websocket http-client proxy cli networking developer-tools networking web-development windows bsd cli rust websocket-client websocket-server netcat socat rfc6455 tcp-proxying unix-sockets socks5 command-line linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="vi/websocat")