CleanThread helps you create background threads that will exit cleanly upon request.

You may either subclass this class and override its main() method, or pass a block to CleanThread.new.

Code invoked by CleanThread should check periodically whether the thread needs to exit, either by invoking the check_finishing method (which raises ThreadFinish if the finish method has been called), or by manually checking the result of the finishing? method and exiting if it returns true.

In addition to providing the #finish and #check_finishing methods, CleanThread takes care of the following:

• Dumping a backtrace to stderr if there is an exception

• Setting the Java thread name (if running under JRuby)

• Releasing ActiveRecord connections (if ActiveRecord is loaded)

gem install clean_thread

require 'clean_thread'

class MyThread < CleanThread
  def main
    loop do
      check_finishing
      # ... do some steps
      check_finishing
      # ... do some more steps
      check_finishing
      # ... do yet more steps
    end
  end
end

t = MyThread.new
t.start
# ...
t.finish

require 'clean_thread'

t = CleanThread.new do
  loop do
    CleanThread.check_finishing
    # ... do some steps
    CleanThread.check_finishing
    # ... do some more steps
    CleanThread.check_finishing
    # ... do yet more steps
  end
end

t.start   # Start the thread
# ...
t.finish  # Stop the thread

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License: See the MIT-LICENSE file.