Eventlet is a concurrent networking library for Python that allows you to change how you run your code, not how you write it.

It uses epoll or libevent for highly scalable non-blocking I/O. Coroutines ensure that the developer uses a blocking style of programming that is similar to threading, but provide the benefits of non-blocking I/O. The event dispatch is implicit, which means you can easily use Eventlet from the Python interpreter, or as a small part of a larger application.

It's easy to get started using Eventlet, and easy to convert existing applications to use it. Start off by looking at the examples, common design patterns, and the list of basic API primitives_.

.. _examples: http://eventlet.net/doc/examples.html .. _common design patterns: http://eventlet.net/doc/design_patterns.html .. _basic API primitives: http://eventlet.net/doc/basic_usage.html

Quick Example

Here's something you can try right on the command line::

% python
>>> import eventlet 
>>> from eventlet.green import urllib2
>>> gt = eventlet.spawn(urllib2.urlopen, 'http://eventlet.net')
>>> gt2 = eventlet.spawn(urllib2.urlopen, 'http://secondlife.com')
>>> gt2.wait()
>>> gt.wait()

Getting Eventlet

The easiest way to get Eventlet is to use easy_install or pip::

easy_install eventlet pip install eventlet

The development tip_ is available via easy_install as well::

easy_install 'eventlet==dev' pip install 'eventlet==dev'

.. _tip: http://bitbucket.org/which_linden/eventlet/get/tip.zip#egg=eventlet-dev

Building the Docs Locally

To build a complete set of HTML documentation, you must have Sphinx, which can be found at http://sphinx.pocoo.org/ (or installed with easy_install sphinx)

cd doc make html

The built html files can be found in doc/_build/html afterward.