[Tutor] Closing BaseHTTPServer...

[Danny Yoo]

> I've been using BaseHTTPServer (and subclassing BaseHTTPRequestHandler,
> of course) for a project at work. However, I can't seem to close my
> connections completely once I'm done with the server. I've tried:
>
> server.server_close()
> del server
>
> but when I try to use the same port again, it complains that it's
> already bound; what's more, the interpreter hangs when I try to exit.
> Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!


Hi Lawrence,

I'm not exactly sure if this is the issue you're running into; if you can
show us code, that'll help.  Are you sure nothing's running as a daemon
afterwards?  You may want to try the unix utility 'telnet' and just make
double-check that the server port is closed.


If everything is truly closed, then it still usually takes a moment
between restarts before the socket is available for use again. If we want
to force the issue, we can use the socket.SO_REUSEADDR attribute.  For a
general idea of what common problem is, see:

    http://www.unixguide.net/network/socketfaq/4.5.shtml


Concretely, before binding the server's socket to a port, we may need to
set a few socket parameters to reuse a port that's still in cooldown.  If
we have a socket object that hasn't been bound yet, then we can do
something like this:

######
socket.setsockopt(socket.SOL_SOCKET, socket.SO_REUSEADDR, 1)
socket.bind(server_address)
######

We shouldn't have to do this either if we're using BaseHTTPServer, since
the mechanism for calling SO_REUSEADDR already exists in
SocketServer.TCPServer.server_bind.


The thing that bothers me is that this should already be happening for
you, since by default, allow_reuse_address is set to true for subclasses
of HTTPServer.  At least, this appears to be true in Python 2.3, according
to this code snippet in the BaseHTTPServer code:

### BaseHTTPServer.py ###
class HTTPServer(SocketServer.TCPServer):

    allow_reuse_address = 1    # Seems to make sense in testing environment

    def server_bind(self):
        """Override server_bind to store the server name."""
        SocketServer.TCPServer.server_bind(self)
        host, port = self.socket.getsockname()[:2]
        self.server_name = socket.getfqdn(host)
        self.server_port = port
######


So I think we need some more information before we nail down what's really
happening.  Show us some error messages, and some code, and we might be
able to get a better idea of the situation.


Good luck!