Python socket.accept nonblocking?

You probably want something like select.select() (see documentation). You supply select() with three lists of sockets: sockets you want to monitor for readability, writability, and error states. The server socket will be readable when a new client is waiting.

The select() function will block until one of the socket states has changed. You can specify an optional fourth parameter, timeout, if you don't want to block forever.

Here is a dumb echo server example:

import select
import socket

server_socket = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
server_socket.setsockopt(socket.SOL_SOCKET, socket.SO_REUSEADDR, 1)
server_socket.bind(('', 8888))
server_socket.listen(5)
print "Listening on port 8888"

read_list = [server_socket]
while True:
    readable, writable, errored = select.select(read_list, [], [])
    for s in readable:
        if s is server_socket:
            client_socket, address = server_socket.accept()
            read_list.append(client_socket)
            print "Connection from", address
        else:
            data = s.recv(1024)
            if data:
                s.send(data)
            else:
                s.close()
                read_list.remove(s)

Python also has epoll, poll, and kqueue implementations for platforms that support them. They are more efficient versions of select.

You can invoke the setblocking(0) method on the Socket to make it non-blocking. Look into the asyncore module or a framework like Twisted.