How do I stop Tornado web server?

In case you do no want to bother with threads, you could catch a keyboard interrupt signal :

try:
    tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()
# signal : CTRL + BREAK on windows or CTRL + C on linux
except KeyboardInterrupt:
    tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().stop()

I just ran into this and found this issue myself, and using info from this thread came up with the following. I simply took my working stand alone Tornado code (copied from all the examples) and moved the actual starting code into a function. I then called the function as a threading thread. My case different as the threading call was done from my existing code where I just imported the startTornado and stopTornado routines.

The suggestion above seemed to work great, so I figured I would supply the missing example code. I tested this code under Linux on a FC16 system (and fixed my initial type-o).

import tornado.ioloop, tornado.web

class Handler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
    def get(self):
        self.write("Hello, world")

application = tornado.web.Application([ (r"/", Handler) ])

def startTornado():
    application.listen(8888)
    tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()

def stopTornado():
    tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().stop()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    import time, threading
    threading.Thread(target=startTornado).start()
    print "Your web server will self destruct in 2 minutes"
    time.sleep(120)
    stopTornado()

Hope this helps the next person.

Here is the solution how to stop Torando from another thread. Schildmeijer provided a good hint, but it took me a while to actually figure the final example that works.

Please see below:

import threading
import tornado.ioloop
import tornado.web
import time


class MainHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
    def get(self):
        self.write("Hello, world!\n")

def start_tornado(*args, **kwargs):
    application = tornado.web.Application([
        (r"/", MainHandler),
    ])
    application.listen(8888)
    print "Starting Torando"
    tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()
    print "Tornado finished"

def stop_tornado():
    ioloop = tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance()
    ioloop.add_callback(ioloop.stop)
    print "Asked Tornado to exit"

def main():

    t = threading.Thread(target=start_tornado)  
    t.start()

    time.sleep(5)

    stop_tornado()
    t.join()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

There is a problem with Zaar Hai's solution, namely that it leaves the socket open. The reason I was looking for a solution to stop Tornado is I'm running unit tests against my app server and I needed a way to start/stop the server between tests to have a clear state (empty session, etc.). By leaving the socket open, the second test always ran into an Address already in use error. So I came up with the following:

import logging as log
from time import sleep
from threading import Thread

import tornado
from tornado.httpserver import HTTPServer


server = None
thread = None


def start_app():
    def start():
        global server
        server = HTTPServer(create_app())
        server.listen(TEST_PORT, TEST_HOST)
        tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()
    global thread
    thread = Thread(target=start)
    thread.start()
    # wait for the server to fully initialize
    sleep(0.5)


def stop_app():
    server.stop()
    # silence StreamClosedError Tornado is throwing after it is stopped
    log.getLogger().setLevel(log.FATAL)
    ioloop = tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance()
    ioloop.add_callback(ioloop.stop)
    thread.join()

So the main idea here is to keep a reference to the HTTPServer instance and call its stop() method. And create_app() just returns an Application instance configured with handlers. Now you can use these methods in your unit tests like this:

class FoobarTest(unittest.TestCase):

    def setUp(self):
        start_app()

    def tearDown(self):
        stop_app()

    def test_foobar(self):
        # here the server is up and running, so you can make requests to it
        pass