[FIXED] How do I run an infinitely looping coroutine in a different thread?

Issue

I'm trying to run an infinite loop to check a web server every 20 seconds, and if it finds something, I want it to send a message to a discord channel via my discord bot. However, I'm neither quite sure how asyncio works because I haven't used async/await much nor do I know how to actually implement this.

I've tried a few things:

async def poll():
    ...
    await send()

threading.Thread(target = poll).start()

This fails because I don't await the poll function. If I don't include the async in async def poll that obviously fails because then the await send() isn't valid.

async def poll():
    ...
    await send()

asyncio.run_coroutine_threadsafe(poll(), asyncio.get_event_loop()) # this freezes the rest of my program and prevents my discord bot from working correctly
asyncio.run_coroutine_threadsafe(poll(), asyncio.new_event_loop()) # this warns me saying "coroutine poll was never awaited" and doesn't seem to execute the loop

I doubt I'm supposed to use threads with asyncio. But how would I make an infinite loop run in parallel to the rest of my code?

Solution

If you want this for a discord bot and using discord.py, then you can use discord.ext.tasks.loop or a background task.

Loop Example: Here

Background Task Example: Here

None of this will affect your bot, until you are not using a blocking module like requests or time.sleep()

Answered By - Just for fun