Running an event loop within its own thread

Question

I'm playing with Python's new(ish) asyncio stuff, trying to combine its event loop with traditional threading. I have written a class that runs the event loop in its own thread, to isolate it, and then provide a (synchronous) method that runs a coroutine on that loop and returns the result. (I realise this makes it a somewhat pointless example, because it necessarily serialises everything, but it's just as a proof-of-concept).

import asyncio
import aiohttp
from threading import Thread


class Fetcher(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self._loop = asyncio.new_event_loop()
        # FIXME Do I need this? It works either way...
        #asyncio.set_event_loop(self._loop)

        self._session = aiohttp.ClientSession(loop=self._loop)

        self._thread = Thread(target=self._loop.run_forever)
        self._thread.start()

    def __enter__(self):
        return self

    def __exit__(self, *e):
        self._session.close()
        self._loop.call_soon_threadsafe(self._loop.stop)
        self._thread.join()
        self._loop.close()

    def __call__(self, url:str) -> str:
        # FIXME Can I not get a future from some method of the loop?
        future = asyncio.run_coroutine_threadsafe(self._get_response(url), self._loop)
        return future.result()

    async def _get_response(self, url:str) -> str:
        async with self._session.get(url) as response:
            assert response.status == 200
            return await response.text()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    with Fetcher() as fetcher:
        while True:
            x = input("> ")

            if x.lower() == "exit":
                break

            try:
                print(fetcher(x))
            except Exception as e:
                print(f"WTF? {e.__class__.__name__}")

To avoid this sounding too much like a "Code Review" question, what is the purpose of asynchio.set_event_loop and do I need it in the above? It works fine with and without. Moreover, is there a loop-level method to invoke a coroutine and return a future? It seems a bit odd to do this with a module level function.

Answer 1

You would need to use set_event_loop if you called get_event_loop anywhere and wanted it to return the loop created when you called new_event_loop.

From the docs

If there’s need to set this loop as the event loop for the current context, set_event_loop() must be called explicitly.

Since you do not call get_event_loop anywhere in your example, you can omit the call to set_event_loop.