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Python run non-blocking async function from sync function

Is there a way to call an async function from a sync one without waiting for it to complete?
My current tests:
Issue: Waits for test_timer_function to complete
async def test_timer_function():
await asyncio.sleep(10)
return
def main():
print("Starting timer at {}".format(datetime.now()))
asyncio.run(test_timer_function())
print("Ending timer at {}".format(datetime.now()))
Issue: Does not call test_timer_function
async def test_timer_function():
await asyncio.sleep(10)
return
def main():
print("Starting timer at {}".format(datetime.now()))
loop = asyncio.new_event_loop()
asyncio.set_event_loop(loop)
asyncio.ensure_future(test_timer_function())
print("Ending timer at {}".format(datetime.now()))
Any suggestions?

Async functions really do not run in the background: they run always in a single thread.
That means that when there are parallel tasks in async code (normal async code), it is only when you give a chance to the asyncio loop to run that those are executed - this happens when your code uses await, call one of async for, async with or return from a co-routine function that is running as a task.
In non-async code, you have to enter the loop and pass control to it, in order to the async code to run - that is what asyncio.run does - and asyncio.ensure_future does not: this call just registers a task to be executed, whenever the asyncio loop has time for it: but you return from the function without ever passing control to the async loop, so your program just finishes.
One thing that can be done is to establish a secondary thread, where the asyncio code will run: this thread will run its asyncio loop, and you can communicate with tasks in it by using global variables and normal thread data structures like Queues.
The minimal changes for your code are:
import asyncio
import threading
from datetime import datetime
now = datetime.now
async def test_timer_function():
await asyncio.sleep(2)
print(f"ending async task at {now()}")
return
def run_async_loop_in_thread():
asyncio.run(test_timer_function())
def main():
print(f"Starting timer at {now()}")
t = threading.Thread(target=run_async_loop_in_thread)
t.start()
print(f"Ending timer at {now()}")
return t
if __name__ == "__main__":
t = main()
t.join()
print(f"asyncio thread exited normally at {now()}")
(please, when posting Python code, include the import lines and lines to call your functions and make your code actually run: it is not a lot of boiler plate like may be needed in other languages, and turn your snippets in complete, ready to run, examples)
printout when running this snippet at the console:
Starting timer at 2022-10-20 16:47:45.211654
Ending timer at 2022-10-20 16:47:45.212630
ending async task at 2022-10-20 16:47:47.213464
asyncio thread exited normally at 2022-10-20 16:47:47.215417

The answer is simply no. It's not gonna happen in a single thread.
First issue:
In your first issue, main() is a sync function. It stops at the line asyncio.run(test_timer_function()) until the event loop finishes its work.
What is its only task? test_timer_function! This task "does" give the control back to event loop but not to the caller main! So if the event loop had other tasks too, they would cooperate with each other. But within the tasks of the event loop, not between event loop and the caller.
So it will wait 10 seconds. There is no other one here to use this 10 seconds to do its work.
Second issue:
You didn't even run the event loop. Check documentation for ensure_future.

Async Errors in python

I'm coding a telegram userbot (with telethon) which sends a message,every 60 seconds, to some chats.
I'm using 2 threads but I get the following errors: "RuntimeWarning: coroutine 'sender' was never awaited" and "no running event loop".
My code:
....
async def sender():
for chat in chats :
try:
if chat.megagroup == True:
await client.send_message(chat, messaggio)
except:
await client.send_message(myID, 'error')
schedule.every(60).seconds.do(asyncio.create_task(sender()))
...
class checker1(Thread):
def run(self):
while True:
schedule.run_pending()
time.sleep(1)
class checker2(Thread):
def run(self):
while True:
client.add_event_handler(handler)
client.run_until_disconnected()
checker2().start()
checker1().start()
I searched for a solution but I didn't find anything...

You should avoid using threads with asyncio unless you know what you're doing. The code can be rewritten using asyncio as follows, since most of the time you don't actually need threads:
import asyncio
async def sender():
for chat in chats :
try:
if chat.megagroup == True:
await client.send_message(chat, messaggio)
except:
await client.send_message(myID, 'error')
async def checker1():
while True:
await sender()
await asyncio.sleep(60) # every 60s
async def main():
await asyncio.create_task(checker1()) # background task
await client.run_until_disconnected()
client.loop.run_until_complete(main())
This code is not perfect (you should properly cancel and wait checker1 at the end of the program), but it should work.
As a side note, you don't need client.run_until_disconnected(). The call simply blocks (runs) until the client is disconnected. If you can keep the program running differently, as long as asyncio runs, the client will work.
Another thing: bare except: are a very bad idea, and will probably cause issues with exception. At least, replace it with except Exception.

There are a few problems with your code. asyncio is complaining about "no running event loop" because your program never starts the event loop anywhere, and tasks can't be scheduled without an event loop running. See Asyncio in corroutine RuntimeError: no running event loop. In order to start the event loop, you can use asyncio.run_until_complete() if you have a main coroutine for your program, or you can use asyncio.get_event_loop().run_forever() to run the event loop forever.
The second problem is the incorrect usage of schedule.every(60).seconds.do(), which is hidden by the first error. schedule expects a function to be passed in, not an awaitable (which is what asyncio.create_task(sender()) returns). This normally would have caused a TypeError, but the create_task() without a running event loop raised an exception first, so this exception was never raised. You'll need to define a function and then pass it to schedule, like this:
def start_sender():
asyncio.create_task(sender())
schedule.every(60).seconds.do(start_sender)
This should work as long as the event loop is started somewhere else in your program.

How to graceful shut down coroutines with Ctrl+C?

I'm writing a spider to crawl web pages. I know asyncio maybe my best choice. So I use coroutines to process the work asynchronously. Now I scratch my head about how to quit the program by keyboard interrupt. The program could shut down well after all the works have been done. The source code could be run in python 3.5 and is attatched below.
import asyncio
import aiohttp
from contextlib import suppress
class Spider(object):
def __init__(self):
self.max_tasks = 2
self.task_queue = asyncio.Queue(self.max_tasks)
self.loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
self.counter = 1
def close(self):
for w in self.workers:
w.cancel()
async def fetch(self, url):
try:
async with aiohttp.ClientSession(loop = self.loop) as self.session:
with aiohttp.Timeout(30, loop = self.session.loop):
async with self.session.get(url) as resp:
print('get response from url: %s' % url)
except:
pass
finally:
pass
async def work(self):
while True:
url = await self.task_queue.get()
await self.fetch(url)
self.task_queue.task_done()
def assign_work(self):
print('[*]assigning work...')
url = 'https://www.python.org/'
if self.counter > 10:
return 'done'
for _ in range(self.max_tasks):
self.counter += 1
self.task_queue.put_nowait(url)
async def crawl(self):
self.workers = [self.loop.create_task(self.work()) for _ in range(self.max_tasks)]
while True:
if self.assign_work() == 'done':
break
await self.task_queue.join()
self.close()
def main():
loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
spider = Spider()
try:
loop.run_until_complete(spider.crawl())
except KeyboardInterrupt:
print ('Interrupt from keyboard')
spider.close()
pending = asyncio.Task.all_tasks()
for w in pending:
w.cancel()
with suppress(asyncio.CancelledError):
loop.run_until_complete(w)
finally:
loop.stop()
loop.run_forever()
loop.close()
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()
But if I press 'Ctrl+C' while it's running, some strange errors may occur. I mean sometimes the program could be shut down by 'Ctrl+C' gracefully. No error message. However, in some cases the program will be still running after pressing 'Ctrl+C' and wouldn't stop until all the works have been done. If I press 'Ctrl+C' at that moment, 'Task was destroyed but it is pending!' would be there.
I have read some topics about asyncio and add some code in main() to close coroutines gracefully. But it not work. Is someone else has the similar problems?

I bet problem happens here:
except:
pass
You should never do such thing. And your situation is one more example of what can happen otherwise.
When you cancel task and await for its cancellation, asyncio.CancelledError raised inside task and shouldn't be suppressed anywhere inside. Line where you await of your task cancellation should raise this exception, otherwise task will continue execution.
That's why you do
task.cancel()
with suppress(asyncio.CancelledError):
loop.run_until_complete(task) # this line should raise CancelledError,
# otherwise task will continue
to actually cancel task.
Upd:
But I still hardly understand why the original code could quit well by
'Ctrl+C' at a uncertain probability?
It dependence of state of your tasks:
If at the moment you press 'Ctrl+C' all tasks are done, non of
them will raise CancelledError on awaiting and your code will finished normally.
If at the moment you press 'Ctrl+C' some tasks are pending, but close to finish their execution, your code will stuck a bit on tasks cancellation and finished when tasks are finished shortly after it.
If at the moment you press 'Ctrl+C' some tasks are pending and
far from being finished, your code will stuck trying to cancel these tasks (which
can't be done). Another 'Ctrl+C' will interrupt process of
cancelling, but tasks wouldn't be cancelled or finished then and you'll get
warning 'Task was destroyed but it is pending!'.

I assume you are using any flavor of Unix; if this is not the case, my comments might not apply to your situation.
Pressing Ctrl-C in a terminal sends all processes associated with this tty the signal SIGINT. A Python process catches this Unix signal and translates this into throwing a KeyboardInterrupt exception. In a threaded application (I'm not sure if the async stuff internally is using threads, but it very much sounds like it does) typically only one thread (the main thread) receives this signal and thus reacts in this fashion. If it is not prepared especially for this situation, it will terminate due to the exception.
Then the threading administration will wait for the still running fellow threads to terminate before the Unix process as a whole terminates with an exit code. This can take quite a long time. See this question about killing fellow threads and why this isn't possible in general.
What you want to do, I assume, is kill your process immediately, killing all threads in one step.
The easiest way to achieve this is to press Ctrl-\. This will send a SIGQUIT instead of a SIGINT which typically influences also the fellow threads and causes them to terminate.
If this is not enough (because for whatever reason you need to react properly on Ctrl-C), you can send yourself a signal:
import os, signal
os.kill(os.getpid(), signal.SIGQUIT)
This should terminate all running threads unless they especially catch SIGQUIT in which case you still can use SIGKILL to perform a hard kill on them. This doesn't give them any option of reacting, though, and might lead to problems.

How to schedule and cancel tasks with asyncio

I am writing a client-server application. While connected, client sends to the server a "heartbeat" signal, for example, every second.
On the server-side I need a mechanism where I can add tasks (or coroutines or something else) to be executed asynchronously. Moreover, I want to cancel tasks from a client, when it stops sending that "heartbeat" signal.
In other words, when the server starts a task it has kind of timeout or ttl, in example 3 seconds. When the server receives the "heartbeat" signal it resets timer for another 3 seconds until task is done or client disconnected (stops send the signal).
Here is an example of canceling a task from asyncio tutorial on pymotw.com. But here the task is canceled before the event_loop started, which is not suitable for me.
import asyncio
async def task_func():
print('in task_func')
return 'the result'
event_loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
try:
print('creating task')
task = event_loop.create_task(task_func())
print('canceling task')
task.cancel()
print('entering event loop')
event_loop.run_until_complete(task)
print('task: {!r}'.format(task))
except asyncio.CancelledError:
print('caught error from cancelled task')
else:
print('task result: {!r}'.format(task.result()))
finally:
event_loop.close()

You can use asyncio Task wrappers to execute a task via the ensure_future() method.
ensure_future will automatically wrap your coroutine in a Task wrapper and attach it to your event loop. The Task wrapper will then also ensure that the coroutine 'cranks-over' from await to await statement (or until the coroutine finishes).
In other words, just pass a regular coroutine to ensure_future and assign the resultant Task object to a variable. You can then call Task.cancel() when you need to stop it.
import asyncio
async def task_func():
print('in task_func')
# if the task needs to run for a while you'll need an await statement
# to provide a pause point so that other coroutines can run in the mean time
await some_db_or_long_running_background_coroutine()
# or if this is a once-off thing, then return the result,
# but then you don't really need a Task wrapper...
# return 'the result'
async def my_app():
my_task = None
while True:
await asyncio.sleep(0)
# listen for trigger / heartbeat
if heartbeat and my_task is None:
my_task = asyncio.ensure_future(task_func())
# also listen for termination of hearbeat / connection
elif not heartbeat and my_task:
if not my_task.cancelled():
my_task.cancel()
else:
my_task = None
run_app = asyncio.ensure_future(my_app())
event_loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
event_loop.run_forever()
Note that tasks are meant for long-running tasks that need to keep working in the background without interrupting the main flow. If all you need is a quick once-off method, then just call the function directly instead.

Python asyncio force timeout

Using asyncio a coroutine can be executed with a timeout so it gets cancelled after the timeout:
#asyncio.coroutine
def coro():
yield from asyncio.sleep(10)
loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
loop.run_until_complete(asyncio.wait_for(coro(), 5))
The above example works as expected (it times out after 5 seconds).
However, when the coroutine doesn't use asyncio.sleep() (or other asyncio coroutines) it doesn't seem to time out. Example:
#asyncio.coroutine
def coro():
import time
time.sleep(10)
loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
loop.run_until_complete(asyncio.wait_for(coro(), 1))
This takes more than 10 seconds to run because the time.sleep(10) isn't cancelled. Is it possible to enforce the cancellation of the coroutine in such a case?
If asyncio should be used to solve this, how could I do that?

No, you can't interrupt a coroutine unless it yields control back to the event loop, which means it needs to be inside a yield from call. asyncio is single-threaded, so when you're blocking on the time.sleep(10) call in your second example, there's no way for the event loop to run. That means when the timeout you set using wait_for expires, the event loop won't be able to take action on it. The event loop doesn't get an opportunity to run again until coro exits, at which point its too late.
This is why in general, you should always avoid any blocking calls that aren't asynchronous; any time a call blocks without yielding to the event loop, nothing else in your program can execute, which is probably not what you want. If you really need to do a long, blocking operation, you should try to use BaseEventLoop.run_in_executor to run it in a thread or process pool, which will avoid blocking the event loop:
import asyncio
import time
from concurrent.futures import ProcessPoolExecutor
#asyncio.coroutine
def coro(loop):
ex = ProcessPoolExecutor(2)
yield from loop.run_in_executor(ex, time.sleep, 10) # This can be interrupted.
loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
loop.run_until_complete(asyncio.wait_for(coro(loop), 1))

Thx #dano for your answer. If running a coroutine is not a hard requirement, here is a reworked, more compact version
import asyncio, time
timeout = 0.5
loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
future = asyncio.wait_for(loop.run_in_executor(None, time.sleep, 2), timeout)
try:
loop.run_until_complete(future)
print('Thx for letting me sleep')
except asyncio.exceptions.TimeoutError:
print('I need more sleep !')
For the curious, a little debugging in my Python 3.8.2 showed that passing None as an executor results in the creation of a _default_executor, as follows:
self._default_executor = concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor()

The examples I've seen for timeout handling are very trivial. Given reality, my app is bit more complex. The sequence is:
When a client connects to server, have the server create another connection to internal server
When the internal server connection is ok, wait for the client to send data. Based on this data we may make a query to internal server.
When there is data to send to internal server, send it. Since internal server sometimes doesn't respond fast enough, wrap this request into a timeout.
If the operation times out, collapse all connections to signal the client about error
To achieve all of the above, while keeping the event loop running, the resulting code contains following code:
def connection_made(self, transport):
self.client_lock_coro = self.client_lock.acquire()
asyncio.ensure_future(self.client_lock_coro).add_done_callback(self._got_client_lock)
def _got_client_lock(self, task):
task.result() # True at this point, but call there will trigger any exceptions
coro = self.loop.create_connection(lambda: ClientProtocol(self),
self.connect_info[0], self.connect_info[1])
asyncio.ensure_future(asyncio.wait_for(coro,
self.client_connect_timeout
)).add_done_callback(self.connected_server)
def connected_server(self, task):
transport, client_object = task.result()
self.client_transport = transport
self.client_lock.release()
def data_received(self, data_in):
asyncio.ensure_future(self.send_to_real_server(message, self.client_send_timeout))
def send_to_real_server(self, message, timeout=5.0):
yield from self.client_lock.acquire()
asyncio.ensure_future(asyncio.wait_for(self._send_to_real_server(message),
timeout, loop=self.loop)
).add_done_callback(self.sent_to_real_server)
#asyncio.coroutine
def _send_to_real_server(self, message):
self.client_transport.write(message)
def sent_to_real_server(self, task):
task.result()
self.client_lock.release()