How to shutdown the loop and print error if coroutine raised an exception with asyncio?

Here are some notes that you might want use to craft your solution:

The easiest way to retrieve a couroutine’s exception (or result!) is to await for it. asyncio.gather() will create tasks from coroutines and wrap all of them in one encompassing task that will fail if one of the subtasks fails:

import asyncio

import random


async def coro(n):
    print("Start", n)
    await asyncio.sleep(random.uniform(0.2, 0.5))
    if n % 4 == 0:
        raise Exception('fail ({})'.format(n))
    return "OK: {}".format(n)


async def main():
    tasks = [coro(i) for i in range(10)]
    await asyncio.gather(*tasks)
    print("done")

loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
try:
    asyncio.ensure_future(main())
    loop.run_forever()
finally:
    loop.close()

This however does not shutdown the loop. To stop a running loop, use loop.stop(). Use this instead:

async def main():
    tasks = [coro(i) for i in range(10)]
    try:
        await asyncio.gather(*tasks)
    except Exception as e:
        loop.stop()
        raise
    print("done")

Stopping the loop while some long-running coroutines are running is probably not what you want. You might want to first signal some your coroutines to shut down using an event:

import asyncio

import random


async def repeat(n):
    print("start", n)
    while not shutting_down.is_set():
        print("repeat", n)
        await asyncio.sleep(random.uniform(1, 3))
    print("done", n)


async def main():
    print("waiting 6 seconds..")
    await asyncio.sleep(6)
    print("shutting down")
    shutting_down.set()  # not a coroutine!
    print("waiting")
    await asyncio.wait(long_running)
    print("done")
    loop.stop()

loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
shutting_down = asyncio.Event(loop=loop)
long_running = [loop.create_task(repeat(i + 1))  for i in range(5)]
try:
    asyncio.ensure_future(main())
    loop.run_forever()
finally:
    loop.close()

If you don’t want to await for your tasks, you might want to use an asyncio.Event (or asyncio.Queue) to signal a global error handler to stop the loop:

import asyncio


async def fail():
    try:
        print("doing stuff...")
        await asyncio.sleep(0.2)
        print("doing stuff...")
        await asyncio.sleep(0.2)
        print("doing stuff...")
        raise Exception('fail')
    except Exception as e:
        error_event.payload = e
        error_event.set()
        raise  # optional


async def error_handler():
    await error_event.wait()
    e = error_event.payload
    print("Got:", e)
    raise e


loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
error_event = asyncio.Event()
try:
    loop.create_task(fail())
    loop.run_until_complete(error_handler())
finally:
    loop.close()

(Used here with run_until_complete() for simplicity, but can be used with loop.stop() as well)

Okay, I’ve found the solution that doesn’t require rewriting any existing code. It may seem hacky, but I think I like it.

Since I already catch KeyboardInterrupt like so.

def main(task=None):
    task = task or start()
    loop = get_event_loop()
    try:
        task = loop.create_task(task)
        future = ensure_future(task)
        loop.run_until_complete(task)
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        print('nperforming cleanup...')
        task.cancel()
        loop.run_until_complete(future)
        loop.close()
        sys.exit()

How about sending KeyboardInterrupt to itself from a coroutine? I thought that this would hang the application, because os.kill would wait for application to close and because the application it would wait is the same application it would make kind of a deadlock, but thankfully I was wrong. And this code actually works and prints clean up before exiting.

async def c(sleep_time=2, fail=False):
    print('c', sleep_time, fail)
    if fail:
        await sleep(sleep_time)
        os.kill(os.getpid(), signal.SIGINT)
    while True:
        print('doing stuff')
        await sleep(sleep_time)



loop = get_event_loop()
loop.create_task(c(sleep_time=10, fail=False))
loop.create_task(c(fail=True))
try:
    loop.run_forever()
except KeyboardInterrupt:
    print('clean up')
    loop.close()
    sys.exit()