Threading/Multiprocessing in Python

Question

I have the following code:

import SimpleHTTPServer
import SocketServer

def http_server():
    PORT = 80
    Handler = SimpleHTTPServer.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler
    httpd = SocketServer.TCPServer(("", PORT), Handler)
    httpd.serve_forever()

The problem with this is that, because of httpd.serve_forever(), it hangs the rest of the program. I'm assuming I could use threading to run this on its own thread, so the rest of the program can execute independently of the server, but I'm not sure how to implement this.

Answer 1

Simplest way, straight from the docs:

from threading import Thread

t = Thread(target=http_server)
t.start()

Note that this thread will be difficult to kill as-is, KeyboardInterrupts do not propagate to random threads that you've start()ed. You may want to set daemon=True or have some more sophisticated method to shut it down.