socketserver.BaseServer

class socketserver.BaseServer(server_address, RequestHandlerClass)

This is the superclass of all Server objects in the module. It defines the interface, given below, but does not implement most of the methods, which is done in subclasses. The two parameters are stored in the respective server_address and RequestHandlerClass attributes.

fileno()

Return an integer file descriptor for the socket on which the server is listening. This function is most commonly passed to selectors, to allow monitoring multiple servers in the same process.

handle_request()

Process a single request. This function calls the following methods in order: get_request(), verify_request(), and process_request(). If the user-provided handle() method of the handler class raises an exception, the server’s handle_error() method will be called. If no request is received within timeout seconds, handle_timeout() will be called and handle_request() will return.

serve_forever(poll_interval=0.5)

Handle requests until an explicit shutdown() request. Poll for shutdown every poll_interval seconds. Ignores the timeout attribute. It also calls service_actions(), which may be used by a subclass or mixin to provide actions specific to a given service. For example, the ForkingMixIn class uses service_actions() to clean up zombie child processes.

Changed in version 3.3: Added service_actions call to the serve_forever method.

service_actions()

This is called in the serve_forever() loop. This method can be overridden by subclasses or mixin classes to perform actions specific to a given service, such as cleanup actions.

New in version 3.3.

shutdown()

Tell the serve_forever() loop to stop and wait until it does.

server_close()

Clean up the server. May be overridden.

address_family

The family of protocols to which the server’s socket belongs. Common examples are socket.AF_INET and socket.AF_UNIX.

RequestHandlerClass

The user-provided request handler class; an instance of this class is created for each request.

server_address

The address on which the server is listening. The format of addresses varies depending on the protocol family; see the documentation for the socket module for details. For Internet protocols, this is a tuple containing a string giving the address, and an integer port number: ('127.0.0.1', 80), for example.

socket

The socket object on which the server will listen for incoming requests.

The server classes support the following class variables:

allow_reuse_address

Whether the server will allow the reuse of an address. This defaults to False, and can be set in subclasses to change the policy.

request_queue_size

The size of the request queue. If it takes a long time to process a single request, any requests that arrive while the server is busy are placed into a queue, up to request_queue_size requests. Once the queue is full, further requests from clients will get a “Connection denied” error. The default value is usually 5, but this can be overridden by subclasses.

socket_type

The type of socket used by the server; socket.SOCK_STREAM and socket.SOCK_DGRAM are two common values.

timeout

Timeout duration, measured in seconds, or None if no timeout is desired. If handle_request() receives no incoming requests within the timeout period, the handle_timeout() method is called.

There are various server methods that can be overridden by subclasses of base server classes like TCPServer; these methods aren’t useful to external users of the server object.

finish_request()

Actually processes the request by instantiating RequestHandlerClass and calling its handle() method.

get_request()

Must accept a request from the socket, and return a 2-tuple containing the new socket object to be used to communicate with the client, and the client’s address.

handle_error(request, client_address)

This function is called if the handle() method of a RequestHandlerClass instance raises an exception. The default action is to print the traceback to standard output and continue handling further requests.

handle_timeout()

This function is called when the timeout attribute has been set to a value other than None and the timeout period has passed with no requests being received. The default action for forking servers is to collect the status of any child processes that have exited, while in threading servers this method does nothing.

process_request(request, client_address)

Calls finish_request() to create an instance of the RequestHandlerClass. If desired, this function can create a new process or thread to handle the request; the ForkingMixIn and ThreadingMixIn classes do this.

server_activate()

Called by the server’s constructor to activate the server. The default behavior for a TCP server just invokes listen() on the server’s socket. May be overridden.

server_bind()

Called by the server’s constructor to bind the socket to the desired address. May be overridden.

verify_request(request, client_address)

Must return a Boolean value; if the value is True, the request will be processed, and if it’s False, the request will be denied. This function can be overridden to implement access controls for a server. The default implementation always returns True.