How to stop BaseHTTPServer.serve_forever() in a Ba

Question

I am running my HTTPServer in a separate thread (using the threading module which has no way to stop threads...) and want to stop serving requests when the main thread also shuts down.

The Python documentation states that BaseHTTPServer.HTTPServer is a subclass of SocketServer.TCPServer, which supports a shutdown method, but it is missing in HTTPServer.

The whole BaseHTTPServer module has very little documentation :(

Answer 1

The event-loops ends on SIGTERM, Ctrl+C or when shutdown() is called.

server_close() must be called after server_forever() to close the listening socket.

import http.server

class StoppableHTTPServer(http.server.HTTPServer):
    def run(self):
        try:
            self.serve_forever()
        except KeyboardInterrupt:
            pass
        finally:
            # Clean-up server (close socket, etc.)
            self.server_close()

Simple server stoppable with user action (SIGTERM, Ctrl+C, ...):

server = StoppableHTTPServer(("127.0.0.1", 8080),
                             http.server.BaseHTTPRequestHandler)
server.run()

Server running in a thread:

import threading

server = StoppableHTTPServer(("127.0.0.1", 8080),
                             http.server.BaseHTTPRequestHandler)

# Start processing requests
thread = threading.Thread(None, server.run)
thread.start()

# ... do things ...

# Shutdown server
server.shutdown()
thread.join()

Answer 2

I tried all above possible solution and ended up with having a "sometime" issue - somehow it did not really do it - so I ended up making a dirty solution that worked all the time for me:

If all above fails, then brute force kill your thread using something like this:

import subprocess
cmdkill = "kill $(ps aux|grep '<name of your thread> true'|grep -v 'grep'|awk '{print $2}') 2> /dev/null"
subprocess.Popen(cmdkill, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, shell=True)