What is the Pythonic way to share state inside a single module?

Question

I need to process signals in my code, and I use global to share states between functions:

exit = False def setup_handler(): signal.signal(signal.SIGTERM, handler) def handler(num, frame): global exit exit = True def my_main(): global exit while not exit: do_something() if __name__ == '__main__': setup_handler() my_main() 

Is there a way to avoid a global variable in this case? What is the best way to share state in this case?

Answer 1

You can use the class to encapsulate the global module, but whether it is worth doing depends on how much you really want to avoid the global one.

 class EventLoop(object): def __init__(self): self.exit = False def run(self): while not self.exit: do_something() def handler(self): self.exit = True # It up to you if you want an EventLoop instance # as an argument, or just a reference to the instance's # handler method. def setup_handler(event_loop): signal.signal(signal.SIGTERM, event_loop.handler) if __name__ == '__main__': loop = EventLoop() setup_handler(loop) loop.run()