Explaining the supported values for that server config option about which interfaces and ports to listen on, or that bot config option about which servers to connect to.

• Listen on a single port on localhost: Just put the number.

  • If types are a concern, supply any integer or a digit-only string.

• Listen on any/all interfaces: *: + port number(s).

  • Specifies that you don't care about interfaces. Usually that results in listening on all available interfaces.
  • For multiple port numbers, see below.

• For multiple values, separate them with at least one space.

  • You can safely put one comma before the spaces if you like to, or even between them. Spaces are any combination of " \t\r\n" = U+0020 space, U+0009 horizontal tab, U+000D carriage return and U+000A line feed.

• Don't listen at all: - (Just put a hyphen-minus.)

  • Might be useful on servers that have additinal other means of interaction.
  • When encountered in a multi-value list, ignore the remaining values.

• Listen on specific interface and ports: Put the interface (as hostname, IP.v4.addr.ess, [IP:v6:addr:ess] or *), a colon (:) and the port(s).

  • Separate multiple ports with comma (,), no spaces. Any space would separate the port from the interface, so it will be parsed as just a port number, as described above.
  • To include all ports of the previous address value, put a single _ U+005F low line) as the first port number.
  • To temporarily exclude (disable) a port number, put a single _ (U+005F low line) directly after it.

An ipaddrportslist parser in JavaScript (ECMAScript) is provided in parser.js. For detailed examples see the test specs. Basic example:

var net = require('net'), ipAddrPortsList = require('ipaddrportslist'),
  listenAddrs = ipAddrPortsList(process.env.HELLOPORT || 2002);

listenAddrs.forEach(function listenOnAddr(lsnAddr) {
  var srv = net.createServer(), descr;
  /* ... handlers setup ... */
  srv.listen(lsnAddr.port, lsnAddr.host);
});

MIT

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