Asyncio Event Loop is Closed

TryingToTry picture TryingToTry · Aug 9, 2017 · Viewed 31.2k times · Source

When trying to run the asyncio hello world code example given in the docs:

import asyncio

async def hello_world():
    print("Hello World!")

loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
# Blocking call which returns when the hello_world() coroutine is done
loop.run_until_complete(hello_world())
loop.close()

I get the error:

RuntimeError: Event loop is closed

I am using python 3.5.3.

Answer

Martijn Pieters picture Martijn Pieters · Aug 9, 2017

You have already called loop.close() before you ran that sample piece of code, on the global event loop:

>>> import asyncio
>>> asyncio.get_event_loop().close()
>>> asyncio.get_event_loop().is_closed()
True
>>> asyncio.get_event_loop().run_until_complete(asyncio.sleep(1))
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/.../lib/python3.6/asyncio/base_events.py", line 443, in run_until_complete
    self._check_closed()
  File "/.../lib/python3.6/asyncio/base_events.py", line 357, in _check_closed
    raise RuntimeError('Event loop is closed')
RuntimeError: Event loop is closed

You need to create a new loop:

loop = asyncio.new_event_loop()

You can set that as the new global loop with:

asyncio.set_event_loop(asyncio.new_event_loop())

and then just use asyncio.get_event_loop() again.

Alternatively, just restart your Python interpreter, the first time you try to get the global event loop you get a fresh new one, unclosed.

As of Python 3.7, the process of creating, managing, then closing the loop (as well as a few other resources) is handled for you when use asyncio.run(). It should be used instead of loop.run_until_complete(), and there is no need any more to first get or set the loop.