How do I stop Tornado web server?

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

Tornado’s IOloop.instance() has trouble stopping from an external signal when run under multiprocessing.Process.

The only solution I came up with that works consistently, is by using Process.terminate():

import tornado.ioloop, tornado.web
import time
import multiprocessing

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

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

class TornadoStop(Exception):
    pass
def stop():
    raise TornadoStop
class worker(multiprocessing.Process):
    def __init__(self):
        multiprocessing.Process.__init__(self)
        application.listen(8888)
        self.ioloop = tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance()

    def run(self):
        self.ioloop.start()

    def stop(self, timeout = 0):
        self.ioloop.stop()
        time.sleep(timeout)
        self.terminate()



if __name__ == "__main__":

    w = worker()
    print 'starting server'
    w.start()
    t = 2
    print 'waiting {} seconds before stopping'.format(t)
    for i in range(t):
        time.sleep(1)
        print i
    print 'stopping'
    w.stop(1)
    print 'stopped'

Here is the solution how to stop Torando from another thread. Schildmeijer provided a good hint, but it took me a while to actually figure the final example that works.

Please see below:

import threading
import tornado.ioloop
import tornado.web
import time


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

def start_tornado(*args, **kwargs):
    application = tornado.web.Application([
        (r"/", MainHandler),
    ])
    application.listen(8888)
    print "Starting Torando"
    tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()
    print "Tornado finished"

def stop_tornado():
    ioloop = tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance()
    ioloop.add_callback(ioloop.stop)
    print "Asked Tornado to exit"

def main():

    t = threading.Thread(target=start_tornado)  
    t.start()

    time.sleep(5)

    stop_tornado()
    t.join()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Just add this before the start():

IOLoop.instance().add_timeout(10,IOLoop.instance().stop)

It will register the stop function as a callback in the loop and lauch it 10 second after the start

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.

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()

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

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!