Question

I’m writing a web application in python, and using lettuce with splinter to write acceptance tests for it.

In order to do this, I need to get a wsgi server to start my application in the background, so that the application is available for my test suite. To do this, I’ve been spinning up a waitress server instance in another thread, for the browser being driven to connect to:

def setUp():
    base = os.path.dirname(__file__) + "/../../.."
    world.app = loadapp('config:test.ini', relative_to=base)
    world.server_thread = thread.start_new_thread(serve_app,  (world.app,))

def serve_app(app):
    serve(app, host='0.0.0.0', port=7654)

This works quite nicely – The running application instance is available to my test suite in order to set up fixtures / mocks etc, and the server is available for my tests to connect to. However, when the tests finish, I’ve no way of sending a signal to the server to shut itself down cleanly. Therefore, is there anyway I can somehow either send a KeyboardInterrupt to the server thread I spawn (which will be caught by waitress and will prompt it to shut down cleanly), or failing that, is there an existing wsgi server implementation which exposes non-blocking start() and stop() methods that I could employ instead of waitress?

Answer 1

Mark the thread you run the WSGI server in as a daemon thread. That way when you exit the main thread it will not wait for the thread the server is running in to complete and will just exit the application.