subprocess.Popen calling httpd reload never finishes

[Albert Hopkins]

On Tue, 2010-08-17 at 12:55 -0700, Nan wrote:
> Hi folks --
> 
> I have a Python script running under Apache/mod_wsgi that needs to
> reload Apache configs as part of its operation.  The script continues
> to execute after the subprocess.Popen call.  The communicate() method
> returns the correct text ("Reloading httpd: [  OK  ]"), and I get a
> returncode of 0.  But the python script (Django) that calls Popen
> never seems to complete (by returning an HTTP response.
> 
> Any other Popen call I've tried exits properly.  Here's some sample
> code:
> 
> 		args = ['sudo /etc/init.d/httpd reload']
> 		proc = subprocess.Popen(args, stdin=subprocess.PIPE,
> stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT, shell=True,
> close_fds=True)
> 		(stdout_txt, stderr_txt) = proc.communicate("")
> 		proc.wait()
> 		logging.debug('%d %s<hr />%s' % (proc.returncode, stdout_txt,
> stderr_txt))
> 		logging.debug('still executing')
> 		return HttpResponse('done')
> 
> The logging statements are output, but the script doesn't exit.  If
> you substitute "sudo ls -l" or "sudo /etc/init.d/httpd configtest" for
> "sudo /etc/init.d/httpd reload", the exits properly.
> 
>  Any idea what I might be doing wrong?
> 
> Thanks!

Django runs inside apache.  It's kinda weird to have an apache process
restart itself and expect it to return to the caller.

If the init script does like mine, "reload" executes "apachectl -k
graceful"   What that instructs apache to do is to restart, but only
kill the process(es) when there are no more connections.  So apache is
waiting for your connection to close, but you are inside an HTTP request
waiting for apache to restart.  So you have a race condition here.

It's not advisable to have apache kill itself and expect it to send a
status back to you telling you it's dead.

See the apache docs[1] for a better explanation.


http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/stopping.html#graceful