Tools for unittesting asynchronous code that uses Tornadio's I/O loop. AssertEventuallyEqual: A TestCase class lets you register any number of functions which are called periodically until they equal their expected values, or time out. The last function that succeeds or times out stops the IOLoop, so your test definitely finishes. The timeout is configurable, either as an argument to assertEventuallyEqual()</code> or as an environment variable TIMEOUT_SEC. Setting a very large timeout value in your environment is useful for debugging a misbehaving unittest—set it to a million seconds so you don't time out while you're stepping through the code. PuritanicalTest: A TestCase class that overrides Tornado's default I/O loop with a PuritanicalIOLoop. Tornado's default loop suppresses exceptions, but the puritanical loop quits and raises an exception if any exception is raised by one of its callbacks. This ensures that your unittests catch errors in callbacks. Example: def async_calculate(callback): """ @param callback: A function taking params (result, error) """ # Do something profoundly complex requiring non-blocking I/O, which # will complete in one second ioloop.IOLoop.instance().add_timeout( time.time() + 1, lambda: callback(42, None) ) class AsyncTest( eventually.AssertEventuallyTest, puritanical.PuritanicalTest ): def test_find(self): results = [] def callback(result, error): print 'Got result', result results.append(result) async_calculate(callback) self.assertEventuallyEqual( 42, lambda: results and results[0] ) ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()