I've implemented a tiny webserver in a separate thread using the nice libevent library. The webserver runs event_base_dispatch() to process all events. What I need is a way to break out this dispatch loop from the main thread.
It boils down to the following C++ code:
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <signal.h>
#include <thread>
#include <evhttp.h>
struct event_base *eb;
std::thread t;
static volatile sig_atomic_t bailout = false;
void my_signal_handler(int) {
bailout = true;
}
void onRequest(evhttp_request *req, void *) {
struct evbuffer *OutBuf = evhttp_request_get_output_buffer(req);
evbuffer_add_printf(OutBuf, "<html><body>Testing 1-2-3</body></html>");
evhttp_send_reply(req, HTTP_OK, "OK", OutBuf);
}
void dispatch() {
eb = event_base_new();
struct evhttp *http = evhttp_new(eb);
evhttp_set_gencb(http, &onRequest, NULL);
evhttp_bind_socket_with_handle(http, "0.0.0.0", 5555);
event_base_dispatch(eb);
}
int main() {
struct sigaction sigIntHandler;
sigIntHandler.sa_handler = my_signal_handler;
sigemptyset(&sigIntHandler.sa_mask);
sigIntHandler.sa_flags = 0;
sigaction(SIGINT, &sigIntHandler, NULL);
t = std::thread { &dispatch };
while ( ! bailout ) {
std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::seconds(1));
}
event_base_loopexit(eb, NULL);
t.join();
}
The behavior is that if you run the program, request a page, abort the program by Ctrl-C, the event_base_dispatch() keeps running until you fetch another web page. Only then the loop aborts and the program terminates.
In the end I implemented breaking out the dispatch loop by adding a timer which basically polls the bailout variable:
And in the dispatch loop, I added:
If you need the event loop to exit before running any more callbacks, use event_base_break()
http://www.wangafu.net/~nickm/libevent-book/Ref3_eventloop.html
One more approach is to put
event_base_loopbreak()
into a signal handler.