Python asyncio recursion with call_later

Question

I am trying to create a simple monitoring system that periodically checks things and logs them. Here is a cutdown example of the logic I am attempting to use but I keep getting a RuntimeWarning: coroutine 'foo' was never awaited error.

How should I reschedule an async method from itself?

Code in test.py:

import asyncio
from datetime import datetime

async def collect_data():
    await asyncio.sleep(1)
    return {"some_data": 1,}

async def foo(loop):
    results = await collect_data()
    # Log the results
    print("{}: {}".format(datetime.now(), results))
    # schedule to run again in X seconds
    loop.call_later(5, foo, loop)

if __name__ == '__main__':

    loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
    loop.create_task(foo(loop))
    loop.run_forever()
    loop.close()

Error:

pi@raspberrypi [0] $ python test.py 
2018-01-03 01:59:22.924871: {'some_data': 1}
/usr/lib/python3.5/asyncio/events.py:126: RuntimeWarning: coroutine 'foo' was never awaited
  self._callback(*self._args)

Answer 1

call_later accepts a plain sync callback (a function defined with def). A coroutine function (async def) should be awaited to be executed.

---

The cool thing about asyncio is that it imitates imperative plain synchronous code in many ways. How would you solve this task for a plain function? I guess just sleep some time and recursively call function again. Do the same (almost - we should use synchronous sleep) with asyncio also:

import asyncio
from datetime import datetime


async def collect_data():
    await asyncio.sleep(1)
    return {"some_data": 1,}


async def foo(loop):
    results = await collect_data()

    # Log the results
    print("{}: {}".format(datetime.now(), results))

    # Schedule to run again in X seconds
    await asyncio.sleep(5)
    return (await foo(loop))


if __name__ ==  '__main__':
    loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
    try:
        loop.run_until_complete(foo(loop))
    finally:
        loop.run_until_complete(loop.shutdown_asyncgens())  # Python 3.6 only
        loop.close()

If you sometime would need to run foo in the background alongside with other coroutines you can create a task. There is also shown a way to cancel task execution.

Update:

As Andrew pointed out, a plain loop is even better:

async def foo(loop):
    while True:
        results = await collect_data()

        # Log the results
        print("{}: {}".format(datetime.now(), results))

        # Wait before next iteration:
        await asyncio.sleep(5)