aiomanhole 0.1

Python module to provide a manhole in asyncio applications

aiomanhole

Manhole for accessing asyncio applications. This is useful for debugging application state in situations where you have access to the process, but need to access internal application state.

Adding a manhole to your application is simple:

from aiomanhole import start_manhole

start_manhole(namespace={
    'gizmo': application_state_gizmo,
    'whatsit': application_state_whatsit,
})

Quick example, in one shell, run this:

$ python -m aiomanhole

In a secondary shell, run this:

$ nc -U /var/tmp/testing.manhole
Well this is neat
>>> f = 5 + 5
>>> f
10
>>> import os
>>> os.getpid()
4238
>>> import sys
>>> sys.exit(0)

And you’ll see the manhole you started has exited.

The package provides both a threaded and non-threaded interpreter, and allows you to share the namespace between clients if you want.

Can I specify what is available in the manhole?

Yes! When you call start_manhole, just pass along a dictionary of what you want to provide as the namespace parameter:

from aiomanhole import start_manhole

start_manhole(namespace={
    'gizmo': application_state_gizmo,
    'whatsit': application_state_whatsit,
    'None': 5,  # don't do this though
})

When should I use threaded=True?

Specifying threaded=True means that statements in the interactive session are executed in a thread, as opposed to executing them in the event loop.

Say for example you did this in a non-threaded interactive session:

>>> while True:
...  pass
...

You’ve just broken your application! You can’t abort that without restarting the application. If however you ran that in a threaded application, you’d ‘only’ have a thread trashing the CPU, slowing down your application, as opposed to making it totally unresponsive.

By default, a threaded interpreter will time out commands after 5 seconds, though this is configurable. Not that this will not kill the thread, but allow you to keep running commands.