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Question

Is it possible to combine async context managers in python? Something similar to asyncio.gather , but able to be used with context managers. Something like this:

async def foo():
    async with asyncio.gather_cm(start_vm(), start_vm()) as vm1, vm2:
        await vm1.do_something()
        await vm2.do_something()

Is this currently possible?

Answer 1

Something close to gather_cm can be achieved with AsyncExitStack , introduced in Python 3.7:

async def foo():
    async with AsyncExitStack() as stack:
        vm1, vm2 = await asyncio.gather(
            stack.enter_async_context(start_vm()),
            stack.enter_async_context(start_vm()))
        await vm1.do_something()
        await vm2.do_something()

Unfortunately, __aexit__ s will still be run sequentially. This is because AsyncExitStack simulates nested context managers, which have a well-defined order and cannot overlap. The outer context manager's __aexit__ is given information on whether the inner one raised an exception. (A database handle's __aexit__ might use this to roll back the transaction in case of exception and commit it otherwise.) Running __aexit__ s in parallel would make the context managers overlap and the exception information unavailable or unreliable. So although gather(...) runs __aenter__ s in parallel, AsyncExitStack records which one came first and runs the __aexit__ s in reverse order.

With async context managers an alternative like gather_cm would make perfect sense. One could drop the nesting semantics and provide an aggregate context manager that worked like an "exit pool" rather than a stack. The exit pool takes a number of context manager that are independent of each other, which allows their __aenter__ and __aexit__ methods to be run in parallel.

The tricky part is handling exceptions correctly: If any __aenter__ raises, the exception must be propagated to prevent the with block from being run. To ensure correctness, the pool must guarantee that __aexit__ will be invoked on all the context managers whose __aenter__ has completed.

Here is an example implementation:

import asyncio
import sys

class gather_cm:
    def __init__(self, *cms):
        self._cms = cms

    async def __aenter__(self):
        futs = [asyncio.create_task(cm.__aenter__())
                for cm in self._cms]
        await asyncio.wait(futs)
        # only exit the cms we've successfully entered
        self._cms = [cm for cm, fut in zip(self._cms, futs)
                     if not fut.cancelled() and not fut.exception()]
        try:
            return tuple(fut.result() for fut in futs)
        except:
            await self._exit(*sys.exc_info())
            raise

    async def _exit(self, *args):
        # don't use gather() to ensure that we wait for all __aexit__s
        # to complete even if one of them raises
        done, _pending = await asyncio.wait(
            [cm.__aexit__(*args)
             for cm in self._cms if cm is not None])
        return all(suppress.result() for suppress in done)

    async def __aexit__(self, *args):
        # Since exits are running in parallel, so they can't see each
        # other exceptions.  Send exception info from `async with`
        # body to all.
        return await self._exit(*args)

This test program shows how it works:

class test_cm:
    def __init__(self, x):
        self.x = x
    async def __aenter__(self):
        print('__aenter__', self.x)
        return self.x
    async def __aexit__(self, *args):
        print('__aexit__', self.x, args)

async def foo():
    async with gather_cm(test_cm('foo'), test_cm('bar')) as (cm1, cm2):
        print('cm1', cm1)
        print('cm2', cm2)

asyncio.run(foo())