[Twisted-Python] Checking whether a server started successfully

Maarten ter Huurne maarten at treewalker.org
Tue Aug 21 18:06:25 EDT 2007


Hi,

I am starting a server process using "twistd -oy" (don't save state; 
application is described by Python source). If all is well, the server is 
started in the background. However, if all is not well, I'd like to detect 
that startup failed.

The particular scenario that I'm using is testing a server using a test 
framework that does HTTP requests. Before the tests are run, the server is 
started and it tries to bind to a fixed port. If there is still an old 
instance of the server running, the bind will fail and any requests made will 
be handled by the old instance instead. That will lead to invalid test 
results.

I worked around it currently by waiting for 3 seconds (probably sufficient 
time to try the binding) and then checking if the process of which the ID 
stored in "twisted.pid" is still running. However, there is no guarantee that 
3 seconds is always enough time for the server to have bound the port. So I'm 
wondering if there is a reliable and elegant way of solving this.

One approach would be to check which process has bound a particular port. I'm 
running this server on Linux and the "netstat" command line tool has access 
to the right information, but not in an easily parseable format. I guess the 
same info can be found in /proc somehow, but are those files guaranteed to 
stay compatible with newer kernels?

Another approach would be to check in advance if something is listening on 
that particular port, but between the time this check is done and the time 
the server tries to bind, some other process might have grabbed the port.

In any case, the port already being bound is just one of the reasons why the 
startup might fail; I'd prefer to have a way to detect startup failures for 
other reasons as well.

One question is when exactly "startup" is finished. For my purpose, the moment 
the reactor is running would be the moment I consider startup to be 
successful. Maybe I can write a file somewhere to explicitly signal that, but 
that's a bit messy (where to put it? is the server process allowed to write 
there? who cleans up the file?).

Maybe it would be useful to have twistd (optionally) wait until the reactor is 
running before returning. I don't want the test script to rely on a patched 
version of Twisted, so this would only be an option if it would make sense to 
integrate such a feature into Twisted itself.

Have you encountered this problem as well? And if so, how did you deal with 
it?

Bye,
		Maarten
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