[FIXED] Cause python to exit if any thread has an exception

Issue

I have a python3 program that starts a second thread (besides the main thread) for handling some events asynchronously. Ideally, my program works without a flaw and never has an unhandled exceptions. But stuff happens. When/if there is an exception, I want the whole interpreter to exit with an error code as if it had been a single thread. Is that possible?

Right now, if an exception occurs on the spawned thread, it prints out the usual error information, but doesn't exit. The main thread just keeps going.

Example

import threading
import time

def countdown(initial):
    while True:
        print(initial[0])
        initial = initial[1:]
        time.sleep(1)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    helper = threading.Thread(target=countdown, args=['failsoon'])
    helper.start()
    time.sleep(0.5)
    #countdown('THISWILLTAKELONGERTOFAILBECAUSEITSMOREDATA')
    countdown('FAST')

The countdown will eventually fail to access [0] from the string because it's been emptied causing an IndexError: string index out of range error. The goal is that whether the main or helper dies first, the whole program dies alltogether, but the stack trace info is still output.

Solutions Tried

After some digging, my thought was to use sys.excepthook. I added the following:

def killAll(etype, value, tb):
    print('KILL ALL')
    traceback.print_exception(etype, value, tb)
    os.kill(os.getpid(), signal.SIGKILL)

sys.excepthook = killAll

This works if the main thread is the one that dies first. But in the other case it does not. This seems to be a known issue (https://bugs.python.org/issue1230540). I will try some of the workarounds there.

While the example shows a main thread and a helper thread which I created, I'm interested in the general case where I may be running someone else's library that launches a thread.

Solution

My solution ended up being a happy marriage between the solution posted here and the SIGKILL solution piece from above. I added the following killall.py submodule to my package:

import threading
import sys
import traceback
import os
import signal


def sendKillSignal(etype, value, tb):
    print('KILL ALL')
    traceback.print_exception(etype, value, tb)
    os.kill(os.getpid(), signal.SIGKILL)


original_init = threading.Thread.__init__
def patched_init(self, *args, **kwargs):
    print("thread init'ed")
    original_init(self, *args, **kwargs)
    original_run = self.run
    def patched_run(*args, **kw):
        try:
            original_run(*args, **kw)
        except:
            sys.excepthook(*sys.exc_info())
    self.run = patched_run


def install():
    sys.excepthook = sendKillSignal
    threading.Thread.__init__ = patched_init

And then ran the install right away before any other threads are launched (of my own creation or from other imported libraries).

Answered By - Travis Griggs