How to start a background process in Python?

Note: This answer is less current than it was when posted in 2009. Using the subprocess module shown in other answers is now recommended in the docs

(Note that the subprocess module provides more powerful facilities for spawning new processes and retrieving their results; using that module is preferable to using these functions.)

If you want your process to start in the background you can either use system() and call it in the same way your shell script did, or you can spawn it:

import os
os.spawnl(os.P_DETACH, 'some_long_running_command')

(or, alternatively, you may try the less portable os.P_NOWAIT flag).

See the documentation here.

You probably want the answer to "How to call an external command in Python".

The simplest approach is to use the os.system function, e.g.:

import os
os.system("some_command &")

Basically, whatever you pass to the system function will be executed the same as if you'd passed it to the shell in a script.

Both capture output and run on background with threading

As mentioned on this answer, if you capture the output with stdout= and then try to read(), then the process blocks.

However, there are cases where you need this. For example, I wanted to launch two processes that talk over a port between them, and save their stdout to a log file and stdout.

The threading module allows us to do that.

First, have a look at how to do the output redirection part alone in this question: Python Popen: Write to stdout AND log file simultaneously

Then:

main.py

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import os
import subprocess
import sys
import threading

def output_reader(proc, file):
    while True:
        byte = proc.stdout.read(1)
        if byte:
            sys.stdout.buffer.write(byte)
            sys.stdout.flush()
            file.buffer.write(byte)
        else:
            break

with subprocess.Popen(['./sleep.py', '0'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE) as proc1, \
     subprocess.Popen(['./sleep.py', '10'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE) as proc2, \
     open('log1.log', 'w') as file1, \
     open('log2.log', 'w') as file2:
    t1 = threading.Thread(target=output_reader, args=(proc1, file1))
    t2 = threading.Thread(target=output_reader, args=(proc2, file2))
    t1.start()
    t2.start()
    t1.join()
    t2.join()

sleep.py

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import sys
import time

for i in range(4):
    print(i + int(sys.argv[1]))
    sys.stdout.flush()
    time.sleep(0.5)

After running:

./main.py

stdout get updated every 0.5 seconds for every two lines to contain:

0
10
1
11
2
12
3
13

and each log file contains the respective log for a given process.

Inspired by: https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2017/interacting-with-a-long-running-child-process-in-python/

Tested on Ubuntu 18.04, Python 3.6.7.

You probably want to start investigating the os module for forking different threads (by opening an interactive session and issuing help(os)). The relevant functions are fork and any of the exec ones. To give you an idea on how to start, put something like this in a function that performs the fork (the function needs to take a list or tuple 'args' as an argument that contains the program's name and its parameters; you may also want to define stdin, out and err for the new thread):

try:
    pid = os.fork()
except OSError, e:
    ## some debug output
    sys.exit(1)
if pid == 0:
    ## eventually use os.putenv(..) to set environment variables
    ## os.execv strips of args[0] for the arguments
    os.execv(args[0], args)

You can use

import os
pid = os.fork()
if pid == 0:
    Continue to other code ...

This will make the python process run in background.

I haven't tried this yet but using .pyw files instead of .py files should help. pyw files dosen't have a console so in theory it should not appear and work like a background process.