How do I unload (reload) a Python module?

Question

I have a long-running Python server and would like to be able to upgrade a service without restarting the server. What\'s the best way do do this?

if foo.py          


        

Answer 1

reload(module), but only if it's completely stand-alone. If anything else has a reference to the module (or any object belonging to the module), then you'll get subtle and curious errors caused by the old code hanging around longer than you expected, and things like isinstance not working across different versions of the same code.

If you have one-way dependencies, you must also reload all modules that depend on the reloaded module to get rid of all the references to the old code. And then reload modules that depend on the reloaded modules, recursively.

If you have circular dependencies, which is very common for example when you are dealing with reloading a package, you must unload all the modules in the group in one go. You can't do this with reload() because it will re-import each module before its dependencies have been refreshed, allowing old references to creep into new modules.

The only way to do it in this case is to hack sys.modules, which is kind of unsupported. You'd have to go through and delete each sys.modules entry you wanted to be reloaded on next import, and also delete entries whose values are None to deal with an implementation issue to do with caching failed relative imports. It's not terribly nice but as long as you have a fully self-contained set of dependencies that doesn't leave references outside its codebase, it's workable.

It's probably best to restart the server. :-)