Question

As a follow-up to cannot-bind-to-address-after-socket-program-crashes, I was receiving this error after my program was restarted:

socket.error: [Errno 98] Address already in use

In this particular case, instead of using a socket directly, the program is starting its own threaded TCP server:

httpd = SocketServer.ThreadingTCPServer(('localhost', port), CustomHandler)
httpd.serve_forever()

How can I fix this error message?

Answer 1

In this particular case, .setsockopt(SOL_SOCKET, SO_REUSEADDR, 1) may be called from the TCPServer class when the allow_reuse_address option is set. So I was able to solve it as follows:

httpd = SocketServer.ThreadingTCPServer(('localhost', port), CustomHandler, False) # Do not automatically bind
httpd.allow_reuse_address = True # Prevent 'cannot bind to address' errors on restart
httpd.server_bind()     # Manually bind, to support allow_reuse_address
httpd.server_activate() # (see above comment)
httpd.serve_forever()

Anyway, thought this might be useful. The solution will differ slightly in Python 3.0