Run Python HTTPServer in Background and Continue Script Execution

You can start the server in a different thread: https://docs.python.org/3/library/_thread.html#thread.start_new_thread

So something like:

import _thread as thread

def start_server():
    # Setup stuff here...
    server.serve_forever()
    
# start the server in a background thread
thread.start_new_thread(start_server, ())
    
print('The server is running but my script is still executing!')

I was trying to do some long-term animation using async and thought I'd have to rewrite server to use aiohttp (https://docs.aiohttp.org/en/v0.12.0/web.html), but Olivers technique of using seperate thread saved me all that pain. My code looks like this, where MyHTTPServer is simply my custom sublass of HTTPServer

import threading
import asyncio
from http.server import BaseHTTPRequestHandler, HTTPServer
import socketserver
import io
import threading

async def tick_async(server):        
    while True:
        server.animate_something()
        await asyncio.sleep(1.0)

def start_server():
    httpd.serve_forever()
    
try:
    print('Server listening on port 8082...')

    httpd = MyHTTPServer(('', 8082), MyHttpHandler)
    asyncio.ensure_future(tick_async(httpd))
    loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
    t = threading.Thread(target=start_server)
    t.start()
    loop.run_forever()

Another example using concurrent.futures :

import concurrent.futures
import http.server

def run_http_server():
    port = 8080
    server_address = ('', port)
    httpd = http.server.HTTPServer(server_address, http.server.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler)
    httpd.serve_forever()

def run_parallel_http_server():
    executor = concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor()
    executor.submit(run_http_server)
    executor.shutdown(wait=False)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    run_parallel_http_server()
    # do something else..