How do I shut down a python simpleHTTPserver?

Question

So I'm trying to learn d3, and the wiki suggested that

To view the examples locally, you must have a local web server. Any web server will work; for example you can run Python's built-in server:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8888 &

Great... only now I have a server running... but at some point I think I should probably shut that down again.

Is there a better way of shutting it down than using kill <pid>? That seems like kind of a big hammer for a little job.

(I'm running Mac OS 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard))

FWIW: ctrl+c gives about 10 lines of traceback, complaining about being interrupted.

kill -3 <pid> gives a Finder warning in a separate window 'Python quit unexpectedly'.

The default kill <pid> and kill -15 <pid> are relatively clean (and simple).

Answer 1

You are simply sending signals to the processes. kill is a command to send those signals.

The keyboard command Ctrl+C (⌃+C) sends a SIGINT, kill -9 sends a SIGKILL, and kill -15 sends a SIGTERM.

What signal do you want to send to your server to end it?

Answer 2

Turns out there is a shutdown, but this must be initiated from another thread.

This solution worked for me: https://stackoverflow.com/a/22533929/573216

Answer 3

Hitting ctrl + c once(wait for traceback), then hitting ctrl+c again did the trick for me :)

Answer 4

When you run a program as a background process (by adding an & after it), e.g.:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8888 &

If the terminal window is still open you can do:

jobs

To get a list of all background jobs within the running shell's process.

It could look like this:

$ jobs
[1]+  Running                 python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8888 &

To kill a job, you can either do kill %1 to kill job "[1]", or do fg %1 to put the job in the foreground (fg) and then use ctrl-c to kill it. (Simply entering fg will put the last backgrounded process in the foreground).

With respect to SimpleHTTPServer it seems kill %1 is better than fg + ctrl-c. At least it doesn't protest with the kill command.

The above has been tested in Mac OS, but as far as I can remember it works just the same in Linux.

Update: For this to work, the web server must be started directly from the command line (verbatim the first code snippet). Using a script to start it will put the process out of reach of jobs.

Answer 5

It seems like overkill but you can use supervisor to start and stop your simpleHttpserver, and completely manage it as a service.

Or just run it in the foreground as suggested and kill it with control c

Answer 6

or you can just do kill %1, which will kill the first job put in background