Establishing a connection

The first thing you will have to do is to connect to a D-Bus bus or to a D-Bus peer. This is the entry point of the zbus API.

Connection to the bus

To connect to the session bus (the per-user bus), simply call Connection::new_session(). It returns an instance of the connection (if all went well).

Similarly, to connect to the system bus (to communicate with services such as NetworkManager, BlueZ or PID1), use Connection::new_system().

Note: it is common for a D-Bus library to provide a “shared” connection to a bus for a process: all new_session() share the same underlying connection for example. At the time of this writing, zbus doesn’t do that.

Using a custom bus address

You may also specify a custom bus with Connection::new_for_address() which takes a D-Bus address as specified in the specification.

Peer to peer connection

Peer-to-peer connections are bus-less¹, and the initial handshake protocol is a bit different. There is the notion of client & server endpoints, but that distinction doesn’t matter once the connection is established (both ends are equal, and can send any messages).

To create a bus-less peer-to-peer connection on Unix, you can make a socketpair() (or have a listening socket server, accepting multiple connections), and hand over the socket FDs to Connection::new_unix_server and Connection::new_unix_client for each side. After success, you can call the Connection methods to send and receive messages on both ends.

See the unix_p2p test in the zbus source code for a simple example.

¹ Unless you implemented them, none of the bus methods will exist.