This document is a guide to the behaviour of the twisted.internet.defer.Deferred object, and to various ways you can use them when they are returned by functions.
This document assumes that you are familiar with the basic principle that the Twisted framework is structured around: asynchronous, callback-based programming, where instead of having blocking code in your program or using threads to run blocking code, you have functions that return immediately and then begin a callback chain when data is available.
After reading this document, the reader should expect to be able to deal with most simple APIs in Twisted and Twisted-using code that return Deferreds.
what sorts of things you can do when you get a Deferred from a function call; and
how you can write your code to robustly handle errors in Deferred code.
Twisted uses the Deferred object to manage the callback sequence.
The client application attaches a series of functions to the deferred to be called in order when the results of the asynchronous request are available (this series of functions is known as a series of callbacks, or a callback chain), together with a series of functions to be called if there is an error in the asynchronous request (known as a series of errbacks or an**errback chain**).
The asynchronous library code calls the first callback when the result is available, or the first errback when an error occurs, and the Deferred object then hands the results of each callback or errback function to the next function in the chain.
A twisted.internet.defer.Deferred is a promise that a function will at some point have a result. We can attach callback functions to a Deferred, and once it gets a result these callbacks will be called. In addition Deferreds allow the developer to register a callback for an error, with the default behavior of logging the error. The deferred mechanism standardizes the application programmer’s interface with all sorts of blocking or delayed operations.
from twisted.internet import reactor, defer
def getDummyData(inputData):
"""
This function is a dummy which simulates a delayed result and
returns a Deferred which will fire with that result. Don't try too
hard to understand this.
"""
print('getDummyData called')
deferred = defer.Deferred()
# simulate a delayed result by asking the reactor to fire the
# Deferred in 2 seconds time with the result inputData * 3
reactor.callLater(2, deferred.callback, inputData * 3)
return deferred
def cbPrintData(result):
"""
Data handling function to be added as a callback: handles the
data by printing the result
"""
print('Result received: {}'.format(result))
deferred = getDummyData(3)
deferred.addCallback(cbPrintData)
# manually set up the end of the process by asking the reactor to
# stop itself in 4 seconds time
reactor.callLater(4, reactor.stop)
# start up the Twisted reactor (event loop handler) manually
print('Starting the reactor')
reactor.run()
Multiple callbacks can be added to a Deferred. The first callback in the Deferred’s callback chain will be called with the result, the second with the result of the first callback, and so on. Why do we need this? Well, consider a Deferred returned by twisted.enterprise.adbapi - the result of a SQL query. A web widget might add a callback that converts this result into HTML, and pass the Deferred onwards, where the callback will be used by twisted to return the result to the HTTP client. The callback chain will be bypassed in case of errors or exceptions.
from twisted.internet import reactor, defer
class Getter:
def gotResults(self, x):
"""
The Deferred mechanism provides a mechanism to signal error
conditions. In this case, odd numbers are bad.
This function demonstrates a more complex way of starting
the callback chain by checking for expected results and
choosing whether to fire the callback or errback chain
"""
if self.d is None:
print("Nowhere to put results")
return
d = self.d
self.d = None
if x % 2 == 0:
d.callback(x*3)
else:
d.errback(ValueError("You used an odd number!"))
def _toHTML(self, r):
"""
This function converts r to HTML.
It is added to the callback chain by getDummyData in
order to demonstrate how a callback passes its own result
to the next callback
"""
return "Result: %s" % r
def getDummyData(self, x):
"""
The Deferred mechanism allows for chained callbacks.
In this example, the output of gotResults is first
passed through _toHTML on its way to printData.
Again this function is a dummy, simulating a delayed result
using callLater, rather than using a real asynchronous
setup.
"""
self.d = defer.Deferred()
# simulate a delayed result by asking the reactor to schedule
# gotResults in 2 seconds time
reactor.callLater(2, self.gotResults, x)
self.d.addCallback(self._toHTML)
return self.d
def cbPrintData(result):
print(result)
def ebPrintError(failure):
import sys
sys.stderr.write(str(failure))
# this series of callbacks and errbacks will print an error message
g = Getter()
d = g.getDummyData(3)
d.addCallback(cbPrintData)
d.addErrback(ebPrintError)
# this series of callbacks and errbacks will print "Result: 12"
g = Getter()
d = g.getDummyData(4)
d.addCallback(cbPrintData)
d.addErrback(ebPrintError)
reactor.callLater(4, reactor.stop)
reactor.run()
Note
Pay particular attention to the handling of self.d in the gotResults method.
Before the Deferred is fired with a result or an error, the attribute is set to None so that the Getter instance no longer has a reference to the Deferred about to be fired.
This has several benefits.
First, it avoids any chance Getter.gotResults will accidentally fire the same Deferred more than once (which would result in an AlreadyCalledError exception).
Second, it allows a callback on that Deferred to call Getter.getDummyData (which sets a new value for the d attribute) without causing problems.
Third, it makes the Python garbage collector’s job easier by eliminating a reference cycle.
Requesting method (data sink) requests data, gets Deferred object.
Requesting method attaches callbacks to Deferred object.
When the result is ready, give it to the Deferred object.
.callback(result) if the operation succeeded, .errback(failure) if it failed.
Note that failure is typically an instance of a twisted.python.failure.Failure instance.
Deferred object triggers previously-added (call/err)back with the result or failure.
Execution then follows the following rules, going down the chain of callbacks to be processed.
Result of the callback is always passed as the first argument to the next callback, creating a chain of processors.
If a callback raises an exception, switch to errback.
An unhandled failure gets passed down the line of errbacks, this creating an asynchronous analog to a series to a series of except: statements.
If an errback doesn’t raise an exception or return a twisted.python.failure.Failure instance, switch to callback.
Deferred’s error handling is modeled after Python’s exception handling. In the case that no errors occur, all the callbacks run, one after the other, as described above.
If the errback is called instead of the callback (e.g. because a DB query raised an error), then a twisted.python.failure.Failure is passed into the first errback (you can add multiple errbacks, just like with callbacks).
You can think of your errbacks as being like except blocks of ordinary Python code.
Unless you explicitly raise an error in an except block, the Exception is caught and stops propagating, and normal execution continues.
The same thing happens with errbacks: unless you explicitly return a Failure or (re-)raise an exception, the error stops propagating, and normal callbacks continue executing from that point (using the value returned from the errback).
If the errback does return a Failure or raise an exception, then that is passed to the next errback, and so on.
Note: If an errback doesn’t return anything, then it effectively returns None, meaning that callbacks will continue to be executed after this errback.
This may not be what you expect to happen, so be careful. Make sure your errbacks return a Failure (probably the one that was passed to it), or a meaningful return value for the next callback.
Also, twisted.python.failure.Failure instances have a useful method called trap, allowing you to effectively do the equivalent of:
try:
# code that may throw an exception
cookSpamAndEggs()
except (SpamException, EggException):
# Handle SpamExceptions and EggExceptions
...
You do this by:
def errorHandler(failure):
failure.trap(SpamException, EggException)
# Handle SpamExceptions and EggExceptions
d.addCallback(cookSpamAndEggs)
d.addErrback(errorHandler)
If none of arguments passed to failure.trap match the error encapsulated in that Failure, then it re-raises the error.
There’s another potential “gotcha” here.
There’s a method twisted.internet.defer.Deferred.addCallbacks which is similar to, but not exactly the same as, addCallback followed by addErrback.
In particular, consider these two cases:
# Case 1
d = getDeferredFromSomewhere()
d.addCallback(callback1) # A
d.addErrback(errback1) # B
d.addCallback(callback2)
d.addErrback(errback2)
# Case 2
d = getDeferredFromSomewhere()
d.addCallbacks(callback1, errback1) # C
d.addCallbacks(callback2, errback2)
If an error occurs in callback1, then for Case 1 errback1 will be called with the failure.
For Case 2, errback2 will be called.
Be careful with your callbacks and errbacks.
What this means in a practical sense is in Case 1, the callback in line A will handle a success condition from getDeferredFromSomewhere, and the errback in line B will handle any errors that occur from either the upstream source, or that occur in A.
In Case 2, the errback in line C will only handle an error condition raised by getDeferredFromSomewhere, it will not do any handling of errors raised in callback1.
If a Deferred is garbage-collected with an unhandled error (i.e. it would call the next errback if there was one), then Twisted will write the error’s traceback to the log file. This means that you can typically get away with not adding errbacks and still get errors logged. Be careful though; if you keep a reference to the Deferred around, preventing it from being garbage-collected, then you may never see the error (and your callbacks will mysteriously seem to have never been called). If unsure, you should explicitly add an errback after your callbacks, even if all you do is:
# Make sure errors get logged
from twisted.python import log
d.addErrback(log.err)
In some applications, there are functions that might be either asynchronous or synchronous. For example, a user authentication function might be able to check in memory whether a user is authenticated, allowing the authentication function to return an immediate result, or it may need to wait on network data, in which case it should return a Deferred to be fired when that data arrives. However, a function that wants to check if a user is authenticated will then need to accept both immediate results and Deferreds.
In this example, the library function authenticateUser uses the application function isValidUser to authenticate a user:
def authenticateUser(isValidUser, user):
if isValidUser(user):
print("User is authenticated")
else:
print("User is not authenticated")
However, it assumes that isValidUser returns immediately, whereas isValidUser may actually authenticate the user asynchronously and return a Deferred.
It is possible to adapt this trivial user authentication code to accept either a synchronous isValidUser or an asynchronous isValidUser, allowing the library to handle either type of function.
It is, however, also possible to adapt synchronous functions to return Deferreds.
This section describes both alternatives: handling functions that might be synchronous or asynchronous in the library function (authenticateUser) or in the application code.
Here is an example of a synchronous user authentication function that might be passed to authenticateUser:
def synchronousIsValidUser(user):
'''
Return true if user is a valid user, false otherwise
'''
return user in ["Alice", "Angus", "Agnes"]
However, here’s an asynchronousIsValidUser function that returns a Deferred:
from twisted.internet import reactor, defer
def asynchronousIsValidUser(user):
d = defer.Deferred()
reactor.callLater(2, d.callback, user in ["Alice", "Angus", "Agnes"])
return d
Our original implementation of authenticateUser expected isValidUser to be synchronous, but now we need to change it to handle both synchronous and asynchronous implementations of isValidUser.
For this, we use maybeDeferred to call isValidUser, ensuring that the result of isValidUser is a Deferred, even if isValidUser is a synchronous function:
from twisted.internet import defer
def printResult(result):
if result:
print("User is authenticated")
else:
print("User is not authenticated")
def authenticateUser(isValidUser, user):
d = defer.maybeDeferred(isValidUser, user)
d.addCallback(printResult)
Now isValidUser could be either synchronousIsValidUser or asynchronousIsValidUser.
It is also possible to modify synchronousIsValidUser to return a Deferred, see Generating Deferreds for more information.
A Deferred may take any amount of time to be called back; in fact, it may never be called back. Your users may not be that patient. Since all actions taken when the Deferred completes are in your application or library’s callback code, you always have the option of simply disregarding the result when you receive it, if it’s been too long. However, while you’re ignoring it, the underlying operation represented by that Deferred is still chugging along in the background, possibly consuming resources such as CPU time, memory, network bandwidth and maybe even disk space. So, when the user has closed the window, hit the cancel button, disconnected from your server or sent a “stop” network message, you will want to announce your indifference to the result of that operation so that the originator of the Deferred can clean everything up and free those resources to be put to better use.
Here’s a simple example. You’re connecting to an external host with an endpoint, but that host is really slow. You want to put a “cancel” button into your application to terminate the connection attempt, so the user can try connecting to a different host instead. Here’s a simple sketch of such an application, with the actual user interface left as an exercise for the reader:
def startConnecting(someEndpoint):
def connected(it):
"Do something useful when connected."
return someEndpoint.connect(myFactory).addCallback(connected)
# ...
connectionAttempt = startConnecting(endpoint)
def cancelClicked():
connectionAttempt.cancel()
Obviously (I hope), startConnecting is meant to be called by some UI element that lets the user choose what host to connect to and then constructs an appropriate endpoint (perhaps using twisted.internet.endpoints.clientFromString).
Then, a cancel button, or similar, is hooked up to the cancelClicked.
When connectionAttempt.cancel is invoked, that will:
cause the underlying connection operation to be terminated, if it is still ongoing
cause the connectionAttempt Deferred to be completed, one way or another, in a timely manner
likely cause the connectionAttempt Deferred to be errbacked with CancelledError
You may notice that that set of consequences is very heavily qualified. Although cancellation indicates the calling API’s desire for the underlying operation to be stopped, the underlying operation cannot necessarily react immediately. Even in this very simple example, there is already one thing that might not be interruptible: platform-native name resolution blocks, and therefore needs to be executed in a thread; the connection operation can’t be cancelled if it’s stuck waiting for a name to be resolved in this manner. So, the Deferred that you are cancelling may not callback or errback right away.
A Deferred may wait upon another Deferred at any point in its callback chain (see “Handling…asynchronous results”, above).
There’s no way for a particular point in the callback chain to know if everything is finished.
Since multiple layers of the callback chain may wish to cancel the same Deferred, any layer may call .cancel() at any time. The .cancel() method never raises any exception or returns any value; you may call it repeatedly, even on a Deferred which has already fired, or which has no remaining callbacks.
The main reason for all these qualifications, aside from specific examples, is that anyone who instantiates a Deferred may supply it with a cancellation function; that function can do absolutely anything that it wants to.
Ideally, anything it does will be in the service of stopping the operation your requested, but there’s no way to guarantee any exact behavior across all Deferreds that might be cancelled.
Cancellation of Deferreds is best effort. This may be the case for a number of reasons:
The Deferred doesn’t know how to cancel the underlying operation.
The underlying operation may have reached an uncancellable state, because some irreversible operation has been done.
The Deferred may already have a result, and so there’s nothing to cancel.
Calling cancel() will always succeed without an error regardless of whether or not cancellation was possible.
In cases 1 and 2 the Deferred may well errback with a twisted.internet.defer.CancelledError while the underlying operation continues.
Deferred s that support cancellation should document what they do when cancelled, if they are uncancellable in certain edge cases, etc..
If the cancelled Deferred is waiting on another Deferred, the cancellation will be forwarded to the other Deferred.
All Deferreds support cancellation. However, by default, they support a very rudimentary form of cancellation which doesn’t free any resources.
Consider this example of a Deferred which is ignorant of cancellation:
operation = Deferred()
def x(result):
print("Hooray, a result:" + repr(x))
operation.addCallback(x)
# ...
def operationDone():
operation.callback("completed")
A caller of an API that receives operation may call cancel on it.
Since operation does not have a cancellation function, one of two things will happen.
If operationDone has been called, and the operation has completed, nothing much will change.
operation will still have a result, and there are no more callbacks, so there’s no observable change in behavior.
If operationDone has not yet been invoked, then operation will be immediately errbacked with a CancelledError.
However, once it’s cancelled, there’s no way to tell operationDone not to run; it will eventually call operation.callback later.
In normal operation, issuing callback on a Deferred that has already called back results in an AlreadyCalledError, and this would cause an ugly traceback that could not be caught.
Therefore, .callback can be invoked exactly once, causing a no-op, on a Deferred which has been cancelled but has no canceller.
If you call it multiple times, you will still get an AlreadyCalledError exception.
Let’s imagine you are implementing an HTTP client, which returns a Deferred firing with the response from the server. Cancellation is best achieved by closing the connection. In order to make cancellation do that, all you have to do is pass a function to the constructor of the Deferred (it will get called with the Deferred that is being cancelled):
class HTTPClient(Protocol):
def request(self, method, path):
self.resultDeferred = Deferred(
lambda ignore: self.transport.abortConnection())
request = b"%s %s HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n" % (method, path)
self.transport.write(request)
return self.resultDeferred
def dataReceived(self, data):
# ... parse HTTP response ...
# ... eventually call self.resultDeferred.callback() ...
Now if someone calls cancel() on the Deferred returned from HTTPClient.request(), the HTTP request will be cancelled (assuming it’s not too late to do so).
Care should be taken not to callback() a Deferred that has already been cancelled.
Sometimes you want to be notified after several different events have all happened, rather than waiting for each one individually. For example, you may want to wait for all the connections in a list to close. twisted.internet.defer.DeferredList is the way to do this.
To create a DeferredList from multiple Deferreds, you simply pass a list of the Deferreds you want it to wait for:
# Creates a DeferredList
dl = defer.DeferredList([deferred1, deferred2, deferred3])
You can now treat the DeferredList like an ordinary Deferred; you can call addCallbacks and so on.
The DeferredList will call its callback when all the deferreds have completed.
The callback will be called with a list of the results of the Deferreds it contains, like so:
# A callback that unpacks and prints the results of a DeferredList
def printResult(result):
for (success, value) in result:
if success:
print('Success:', value)
else:
print('Failure:', value.getErrorMessage())
# Create three deferreds.
deferred1 = defer.Deferred()
deferred2 = defer.Deferred()
deferred3 = defer.Deferred()
# Pack them into a DeferredList
dl = defer.DeferredList([deferred1, deferred2, deferred3], consumeErrors=True)
# Add our callback
dl.addCallback(printResult)
# Fire our three deferreds with various values.
deferred1.callback('one')
deferred2.errback(Exception('bang!'))
deferred3.callback('three')
# At this point, dl will fire its callback, printing:
# Success: one
# Failure: bang!
# Success: three
# (note that defer.SUCCESS == True, and defer.FAILURE == False)
A standard DeferredList will never call errback, but failures in Deferreds passed to a DeferredList will still errback unless consumeErrors is passed True.
See below for more details about this and other flags which modify the behavior of DeferredList.
Note
If you want to apply callbacks to the individual Deferreds that go into the DeferredList, you should be careful about when those callbacks are added. The act of adding a Deferred to a DeferredList inserts a callback into that Deferred (when that callback is run, it checks to see if the DeferredList has been completed yet). The important thing to remember is that it is this callback which records the value that goes into the result list handed to the DeferredList’s callback.
Therefore, if you add a callback to the Deferred after adding the Deferred to the DeferredList, the value returned by that callback will not be given to the DeferredList’s callback. To avoid confusion, we recommend not adding callbacks to a Deferred once it has been used in a DeferredList.
def printResult(result):
print(result)
def addTen(result):
return result + " ten"
# Deferred gets callback before DeferredList is created
deferred1 = defer.Deferred()
deferred2 = defer.Deferred()
deferred1.addCallback(addTen)
dl = defer.DeferredList([deferred1, deferred2])
dl.addCallback(printResult)
deferred1.callback("one") # fires addTen, checks DeferredList, stores "one ten"
deferred2.callback("two")
# At this point, dl will fire its callback, printing:
# [(1, 'one ten'), (1, 'two')]
# Deferred gets callback after DeferredList is created
deferred1 = defer.Deferred()
deferred2 = defer.Deferred()
dl = defer.DeferredList([deferred1, deferred2])
deferred1.addCallback(addTen) # will run *after* DeferredList gets its value
dl.addCallback(printResult)
deferred1.callback("one") # checks DeferredList, stores "one", fires addTen
deferred2.callback("two")
# At this point, dl will fire its callback, printing:
# [(1, 'one), (1, 'two')]
DeferredList accepts three keyword arguments that modify its behaviour: fireOnOneCallback , fireOnOneErrback and consumeErrors.
If fireOnOneCallback is set, the DeferredList will immediately call its callback as soon as any of its Deferreds call their callback.
Similarly, fireOnOneErrback will call errback as soon as any of the Deferreds call their errback.
Note that DeferredList is still one-shot, like ordinary Deferreds, so after a callback or errback has been called the DeferredList will do nothing further (it will just silently ignore any other results from its Deferreds).
The fireOnOneErrback option is particularly useful when you want to wait for all the results if everything succeeds, but also want to know immediately if something fails.
The consumeErrors argument will stop the DeferredList from propagating any errors along the callback chains of any Deferreds it contains (usually creating a DeferredList has no effect on the results passed along the callbacks and errbacks of their Deferreds).
Stopping errors at the DeferredList with this option will prevent “Unhandled error in Deferred” warnings from the Deferreds it contains without needing to add extra errbacks [1] .
Passing a true value for the consumeErrors parameter will not change the behavior of fireOnOneCallback or fireOnOneErrback.
A common use for DeferredList is to “join” a number of parallel asynchronous operations, finishing successfully if all of the operations were successful, or failing if any one of the operations fails. In this case, twisted.internet.defer.gatherResults is a useful shortcut:
from twisted.internet import defer
d1 = defer.Deferred()
d2 = defer.Deferred()
d = defer.gatherResults([d1, d2], consumeErrors=True)
def cbPrintResult(result):
print(result)
d.addCallback(cbPrintResult)
d1.callback("one")
# nothing is printed yet; d is still awaiting completion of d2
d2.callback("two")
# printResult prints ["one", "two"]
The consumeErrors argument has the same meaning as it does for DeferredList: if true, it causes gatherResults to consume any errors in the passed-in Deferreds.
Always use this argument unless you are adding further callbacks or errbacks to the passed-in Deferreds, or unless you know that they will not fail.
Otherwise, a failure will result in an unhandled error being logged by Twisted.
This argument is available since Twisted 11.1.0.
This is an overview API reference for Deferred from the point of using a Deferred returned by a function. It is not meant to be a substitute for the docstrings in the Deferred class, but can provide guidelines for its use.
There is a parallel overview of functions used by the Deferred’s creator in Generating Deferreds.
addCallbacks(self, callback[, errback, callbackArgs, callbackKeywords, errbackArgs, errbackKeywords])
This is the method you will use to interact with Deferred.
It adds a pair of callbacks “parallel” to each other (see diagram above) in the list of callbacks made when the Deferred is called back to.
The signature of a method added using addCallbacks should be myMethod(result, *methodAsrgs, **methodKeywords).
If your method is passed in the callback slot, for example, all arguments in the tuple callbackArgs will be passed as *methodArgs to your method.
There are various convenience methods that are derivative of addCallbacks. I will not cover them in detail here, but it is important to know about them in order to create concise code.
addCallback(callback, *callbackArgs, **callbackKeywords)
Adds your callback at the next point in the processing chain, while adding an errback that will re-raise its first argument, not affecting further processing in the error case.
Note that, while addCallbacks (plural) requires the arguments to be passed in a tuple, addCallback (singular) takes all its remaining arguments as things to be passed to the callback function. The reason is obvious: addCallbacks (plural) cannot tell whether the arguments are meant for the callback or the errback, so they must be specifically marked by putting them into a tuple. addCallback (singular) knows that everything is destined to go to the callback, so it can use Python’s “*” and “**” syntax to collect the remaining arguments.
addErrback(errback, *errbackArgs, **errbackKeywords)
Adds your errback at the next point in the processing chain, while adding a callback that will return its first argument, not affecting further processing in the success case.
addBoth(callbackOrErrback, *callbackOrErrbackArgs, **callbackOrErrbackKeywords)
This method adds the same callback into both sides of the processing chain at both points.
Keep in mind that the type of the first argument is indeterminate if you use this method!
Use it for finally: style blocks.
If you need one Deferred to wait on another, all you need to do is return a Deferred from a method added to addCallbacks. Specifically, if you return Deferred B from a method added to Deferred A using A.addCallbacks, Deferred A’s processing chain will stop until Deferred B’s .callback() method is called; at that point, the next callback in A will be passed the result of the last callback in Deferred B’s processing chain at the time.
Note
If a Deferred is somehow returned from its own callbacks (directly or indirectly), the behavior is undefined. The Deferred code will make an attempt to detect this situation and produce a warning. In the future, this will become an exception.
If this seems confusing, don’t worry about it right now – when you run into a situation where you need this behavior, you will probably recognize it immediately and realize why this happens. If you want to chain deferreds manually, there is also a convenience method to help you.
chainDeferred(otherDeferred)
Add otherDeferred to the end of this Deferred’s processing chain.
When self.callback is called, the result of my processing chain up to this point will be passed to otherDeferred.callback.
Further additions to my callback chain do not affect otherDeferred.
This is the same as self.addCallbacks(otherDeferred.callback, otherDeferred.errback).
Generating Deferreds, an introduction to writing asynchronous functions that return Deferreds.
Footnotes