How do I stop Tornado web server?

Question

I\'ve been playing around a bit with the Tornado web server and have come to a point where I want to stop the web server (for example during unit testing). The following sim

Answer 1

There is a problem with Zaar Hai's solution, namely that it leaves the socket open. The reason I was looking for a solution to stop Tornado is I'm running unit tests against my app server and I needed a way to start/stop the server between tests to have a clear state (empty session, etc.). By leaving the socket open, the second test always ran into an Address already in use error. So I came up with the following:

import logging as log
from time import sleep
from threading import Thread

import tornado
from tornado.httpserver import HTTPServer


server = None
thread = None


def start_app():
    def start():
        global server
        server = HTTPServer(create_app())
        server.listen(TEST_PORT, TEST_HOST)
        tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()
    global thread
    thread = Thread(target=start)
    thread.start()
    # wait for the server to fully initialize
    sleep(0.5)


def stop_app():
    server.stop()
    # silence StreamClosedError Tornado is throwing after it is stopped
    log.getLogger().setLevel(log.FATAL)
    ioloop = tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance()
    ioloop.add_callback(ioloop.stop)
    thread.join()

So the main idea here is to keep a reference to the HTTPServer instance and call its stop() method. And create_app() just returns an Application instance configured with handlers. Now you can use these methods in your unit tests like this:

class FoobarTest(unittest.TestCase):

    def setUp(self):
        start_app()

    def tearDown(self):
        stop_app()

    def test_foobar(self):
        # here the server is up and running, so you can make requests to it
        pass