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

If you need this behavior for unit testing, take a look at tornado.testing.AsyncTestCase.

By default, a new IOLoop is constructed for each test and is available as self.io_loop. This IOLoop should be used in the construction of HTTP clients/servers, etc. If the code being tested requires a global IOLoop, subclasses should override get_new_ioloop to return it.

If you need to start and stop an IOLoop for some other purpose and can't call ioloop.stop() from a callback for some reason, a multi-threaded implementation is possible. To avoid race conditions, however, you need to synchronize access to the ioloop, which is actually impossible. Something like the following will result in deadlock:

Thread 1:

with lock:
    ioloop.start()

Thread 2:

with lock:
    ioloop.stop()

because thread 1 will never release the lock (start() is blocking) and thread 2 will wait till the lock is released to stop the ioloop.

The only way to do it is for thread 2 to call ioloop.add_callback(ioloop.stop), which will call stop() on thread 1 in the event loop's next iteration. Rest assured, ioloop.add_callback() is thread-safe.

Answer 2

In case you do no want to bother with threads, you could catch a keyboard interrupt signal :

try:
    tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()
# signal : CTRL + BREAK on windows or CTRL + C on linux
except KeyboardInterrupt:
    tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().stop()

Answer 3

We want to use a multiprocessing.Process with a tornado.ioloop.IOLoop to work around the cPython GIL for performance and independency. To get access to the IOLoop we need to use Queue to pass the shutdown signal through.

Here is a minimalistic example:

class Server(BokehServer)

    def start(self, signal=None):
        logger.info('Starting server on http://localhost:%d'
                    % (self.port))

        if signal is not None:
            def shutdown():
                if not signal.empty():
                    self.stop()
            tornado.ioloop.PeriodicCallback(shutdown, 1000).start()

        BokehServer.start(self)
        self.ioloop.start()

    def stop(self, *args, **kwargs):  # args important for signals
        logger.info('Stopping server...')
        BokehServer.stop(self)
        self.ioloop.stop()

The Process

import multiprocessing as mp
import signal

from server import Server  # noqa

class ServerProcess(mp.Process):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.server = Server(*args, **kwargs)
        self.shutdown_signal = _mp.Queue(1)
        mp.Process.__init__(self)

        signal.signal(signal.SIGTERM, self.server.stop)
        signal.signal(signal.SIGINT, self.server.stop)

    def run(self):
        self.server.start(signal=self.shutdown_signal)

    def stop(self):
        self.shutdown_signal.put(True)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    p = ServerProcess()
    p.start()

Cheers!

Answer 4

To stop the entire ioloop you simply invoke the ioloop.stop method when you have finished the unit test. (Remember that the only (documented) thread safe method is ioloop.add_callback, ie. if the unit tests is executed by another thread, you could wrap the stop invocation in a callback)

If its enough to stop the http web server you invoke the httpserver.stop() method

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

I just ran into this and found this issue myself, and using info from this thread came up with the following. I simply took my working stand alone Tornado code (copied from all the examples) and moved the actual starting code into a function. I then called the function as a threading thread. My case different as the threading call was done from my existing code where I just imported the startTornado and stopTornado routines.

The suggestion above seemed to work great, so I figured I would supply the missing example code. I tested this code under Linux on a FC16 system (and fixed my initial type-o).

import tornado.ioloop, tornado.web

class Handler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
    def get(self):
        self.write("Hello, world")

application = tornado.web.Application([ (r"/", Handler) ])

def startTornado():
    application.listen(8888)
    tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()

def stopTornado():
    tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().stop()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    import time, threading
    threading.Thread(target=startTornado).start()
    print "Your web server will self destruct in 2 minutes"
    time.sleep(120)
    stopTornado()

Hope this helps the next person.