Proper way to shutdown asyncio tasks

The cancellation is not immediate and requires running ioloop to be resolved with exception CancelledError. Remove ioloop.stop from shutdown and handle exception in supervisor, to make things work. Below simplified example.

Important is, however you can cancel Task, it only stops watching/waiting for end/results and loop won’t handle further events for it. But the underneath request/pipe will not be stopped.

Simplified example:

import asyncio
import functools
import logging
import signal
import sys
from concurrent.futures import CancelledError


def shutdown(loop):
    logging.info('received stop signal, cancelling tasks...')
    for task in asyncio.Task.all_tasks():
        task.cancel()
    logging.info('bye, exiting in a minute...')    


@asyncio.coroutine
def get(i):
    logging.info('sleep for %d', i)
    yield from asyncio.sleep(i)    


@asyncio.coroutine
def pull_stats():
    coroutines = [get(i) for i in range(10,20)]
    status = yield from asyncio.gather(*coroutines)


def supervisor(loop):
    try:
        while True:
            result = loop.run_until_complete(pull_stats())
    except CancelledError:
        logging.info('CancelledError')
    loop.close()
    sys.exit(1)


def main():
    logging.getLogger().setLevel(logging.INFO)
    loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
    loop.add_signal_handler(signal.SIGHUP, functools.partial(shutdown, loop))
    loop.add_signal_handler(signal.SIGTERM, functools.partial(shutdown, loop))
    supervisor(loop)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Note, that if you cancel only gather's Future, all children will be set as cancelled as well.

And the sleep thing

Any receipt of a signal or interrupt causes the program to resume execution. So when the process receive SIGTERM and handler is set, python allows you to handle it, to do this thread is resumed and sighandler is called. Due to implementation of ioloop and its signal handling, it keeps running after wake.