How to close a thread from within?

When you start a thread, it begins executing a function you give it (if you're extending threading.Thread, the function will be run()). To end the thread, just return from that function.

According to this, you can also call thread.exit(), which will throw an exception that will end the thread silently.

How about sys.exit() from the module sys.

If sys.exit() is executed from within a thread it will close that thread only.

This answer here talks about that: Why does sys.exit() not exit when called inside a thread in Python?

A little late, but I use a _is_running variable to tell the thread when I want to close. It's easy to use, just implement a stop() inside your thread class.

def stop(self):
  self._is_running = False

And in run() just loop on while(self._is_running)

If you want force stop your thread: thread._Thread_stop() For me works very good.