Tornado Cheat Sheet
|
This content was generated with the assistance of AI and should be verified against the official documentation before being relied on in production. The reference material consulted while preparing these pages is listed in the section bibliography. |
A single-page, colour-coded summary of the Tornado essentials, written against Tornado 6.5.10 (released 2026-09-15) and
Python 3.10+ (versions verified 2026-10-07; Tornado 6.6 is only an alpha, so its items are marked upcoming) — the
asyncio.run(main()) skeleton, Application settings, the RequestHandler lifecycle and its input and output methods,
routing and reverse_url, template syntax and UI modules, signed cookies, @authenticated, XSRF and the upcoming
cross_origin_protection, coroutines (gather and multi, run_in_executor, PeriodicCallback), queues and locks,
AsyncHTTPClient, WebSocketHandler and the client, stream_request_body, long polling and Server-Sent Events,
tornado.options and logging, AsyncHTTPTestCase and gen_test, multi-process deployment behind nginx, and a "legacy
to current" strip of what changed since older tutorials — handy for quick memorization or as a
downloadable PDF desk reference.
For the full explanation, every option, and additional examples, see the dedicated pages:
Start here — Python Tornado.
Foundations — Introduction & Architecture, Getting Started, Asynchronous I/O & the Event Loop, Coroutines & asyncio, and Queues & Locks.
The web framework — Applications & Request Handlers, Routing, Error Handling, Templates & UI Modules, Static Files, and Localization.
Security — Authentication & Signed Cookies, XSRF & Cross-Origin Protection, and Third-party Authentication.
HTTP clients, real-time and networking — Async HTTP Client, WebSockets, Streaming, Long Polling & SSE, and TCP Servers, IOStream & Low-level Networking.
Data, configuration and testing — Databases & Async Drivers, Options, Configuration & Logging, and Testing.
Production — Running & Deploying, WSGI Interoperability, and What’s Changed & Migration.
References
The PDF summarizes the official documentation; each source is cited in full on the page listed above that covers it, and in the section bibliography.