Structure of a Tornado web application

A Tornado web application generally consists of one or more RequestHandler subclasses, an Application object which routes incoming requests to handlers, and a main() function to start the server.

A minimal “hello world” example looks something like this:

import tornado.ioloop
import tornado.web

class MainHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
    def get(self):
        self.write("Hello, world")

def make_app():
    return tornado.web.Application([
        (r"/", MainHandler),

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = make_app()

The Application object

The Application object is responsible for global configuration, including the routing table that maps requests to handlers.

The routing table is a list of URLSpec objects (or tuples), each of which contains (at least) a regular expression and a handler class. Order matters; the first matching rule is used. If the regular expression contains capturing groups, these groups are the path arguments and will be passed to the handler’s HTTP method. If a dictionary is passed as the third element of the URLSpec, it supplies the initialization arguments which will be passed to RequestHandler.initialize. Finally, the URLSpec may have a name, which will allow it to be used with RequestHandler.reverse_url.

For example, in this fragment the root URL / is mapped to MainHandler and URLs of the form /story/ followed by a number are mapped to StoryHandler. That number is passed (as a string) to StoryHandler.get.

class MainHandler(RequestHandler):
    def get(self):
        self.write('<a href="%s">link to story 1</a>' %
                   self.reverse_url("story", "1"))

class StoryHandler(RequestHandler):
    def initialize(self, db):
        self.db = db

    def get(self, story_id):
        self.write("this is story %s" % story_id)

app = Application([
    url(r"/", MainHandler),
    url(r"/story/([0-9]+)", StoryHandler, dict(db=db), name="story")

The Application constructor takes many keyword arguments that can be used to customize the behavior of the application and enable optional features; see Application.settings for the complete list.

Subclassing RequestHandler

Most of the work of a Tornado web application is done in subclasses of RequestHandler. The main entry point for a handler subclass is a method named after the HTTP method being handled: get(), post(), etc. Each handler may define one or more of these methods to handle different HTTP actions. As described above, these methods will be called with arguments corresponding to the capturing groups of the routing rule that matched.

Within a handler, call methods such as RequestHandler.render or RequestHandler.write to produce a response. render() loads a Template by name and renders it with the given arguments. write() is used for non-template-based output; it accepts strings, bytes, and dictionaries (dicts will be encoded as JSON).

Many methods in RequestHandler are designed to be overridden in subclasses and be used throughout the application. It is common to define a BaseHandler class that overrides methods such as write_error and get_current_user and then subclass your own BaseHandler instead of RequestHandler for all your specific handlers.

Handling request input

The request handler can access the object representing the current request with self.request. See the class definition for HTTPServerRequest for a complete list of attributes.

Request data in the formats used by HTML forms will be parsed for you and is made available in methods like get_query_argument and get_body_argument.

class MyFormHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
    def get(self):
        self.write('<html><body><form action="/myform" method="POST">'
                   '<input type="text" name="message">'
                   '<input type="submit" value="Submit">'

    def post(self):
        self.set_header("Content-Type", "text/plain")
        self.write("You wrote " + self.get_body_argument("message"))

Since the HTML form encoding is ambiguous as to whether an argument is a single value or a list with one element, RequestHandler has distinct methods to allow the application to indicate whether or not it expects a list. For lists, use get_query_arguments and get_body_arguments instead of their singular counterparts.

Files uploaded via a form are available in self.request.files, which maps names (the name of the HTML <input type="file"> element) to a list of files. Each file is a dictionary of the form {"filename":..., "content_type":..., "body":...}. The files object is only present if the files were uploaded with a form wrapper (i.e. a multipart/form-data Content-Type); if this format was not used the raw uploaded data is available in self.request.body. By default uploaded files are fully buffered in memory; if you need to handle files that are too large to comfortably keep in memory see the stream_request_body class decorator.

In the demos directory, shows both methods of receiving file uploads.

Due to the quirks of the HTML form encoding (e.g. the ambiguity around singular versus plural arguments), Tornado does not attempt to unify form arguments with other types of input. In particular, we do not parse JSON request bodies. Applications that wish to use JSON instead of form-encoding may override prepare to parse their requests:

def prepare(self):
    if self.request.headers.get("Content-Type", "").startswith("application/json"):
        self.json_args = json.loads(self.request.body)
        self.json_args = None

Overriding RequestHandler methods

In addition to get()/post()/etc, certain other methods in RequestHandler are designed to be overridden by subclasses when necessary. On every request, the following sequence of calls takes place:

  1. A new RequestHandler object is created on each request.

  2. initialize() is called with the initialization arguments from the Application configuration. initialize should typically just save the arguments passed into member variables; it may not produce any output or call methods like send_error.

  3. prepare() is called. This is most useful in a base class shared by all of your handler subclasses, as prepare is called no matter which HTTP method is used. prepare may produce output; if it calls finish (or redirect, etc), processing stops here.

  4. One of the HTTP methods is called: get(), post(), put(), etc. If the URL regular expression contains capturing groups, they are passed as arguments to this method.

  5. When the request is finished, on_finish() is called. This is generally after get() or another HTTP method returns.

All methods designed to be overridden are noted as such in the RequestHandler documentation. Some of the most commonly overridden methods include:

Error Handling

If a handler raises an exception, Tornado will call RequestHandler.write_error to generate an error page. tornado.web.HTTPError can be used to generate a specified status code; all other exceptions return a 500 status.

The default error page includes a stack trace in debug mode and a one-line description of the error (e.g. “500: Internal Server Error”) otherwise. To produce a custom error page, override RequestHandler.write_error (probably in a base class shared by all your handlers). This method may produce output normally via methods such as write and render. If the error was caused by an exception, an exc_info triple will be passed as a keyword argument (note that this exception is not guaranteed to be the current exception in sys.exc_info, so write_error must use e.g. traceback.format_exception instead of traceback.format_exc).

It is also possible to generate an error page from regular handler methods instead of write_error by calling set_status, writing a response, and returning. The special exception tornado.web.Finish may be raised to terminate the handler without calling write_error in situations where simply returning is not convenient.

For 404 errors, use the default_handler_class Application setting. This handler should override prepare instead of a more specific method like get() so it works with any HTTP method. It should produce its error page as described above: either by raising a HTTPError(404) and overriding write_error, or calling self.set_status(404) and producing the response directly in prepare().


There are two main ways you can redirect requests in Tornado: RequestHandler.redirect and with the RedirectHandler.

You can use self.redirect() within a RequestHandler method to redirect users elsewhere. There is also an optional parameter permanent which you can use to indicate that the redirection is considered permanent. The default value of permanent is False, which generates a 302 Found HTTP response code and is appropriate for things like redirecting users after successful POST requests. If permanent is True, the 301 Moved Permanently HTTP response code is used, which is useful for e.g. redirecting to a canonical URL for a page in an SEO-friendly manner.

RedirectHandler lets you configure redirects directly in your Application routing table. For example, to configure a single static redirect:

app = tornado.web.Application([
    url(r"/app", tornado.web.RedirectHandler,

RedirectHandler also supports regular expression substitutions. The following rule redirects all requests beginning with /pictures/ to the prefix /photos/ instead:

app = tornado.web.Application([
    url(r"/photos/(.*)", MyPhotoHandler),
    url(r"/pictures/(.*)", tornado.web.RedirectHandler,

Unlike RequestHandler.redirect, RedirectHandler uses permanent redirects by default. This is because the routing table does not change at runtime and is presumed to be permanent, while redirects found in handlers are likely to be the result of other logic that may change. To send a temporary redirect with a RedirectHandler, add permanent=False to the RedirectHandler initialization arguments.

Asynchronous handlers

Certain handler methods (including prepare() and the HTTP verb methods get()/post()/etc) may be overridden as coroutines to make the handler asynchronous.

For example, here is a simple handler using a coroutine:

class MainHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
    async def get(self):
        http = tornado.httpclient.AsyncHTTPClient()
        response = await http.fetch("")
        json = tornado.escape.json_decode(response.body)
        self.write("Fetched " + str(len(json["entries"])) + " entries "
                   "from the FriendFeed API")

For a more advanced asynchronous example, take a look at the chat example application, which implements an AJAX chat room using long polling. Users of long polling may want to override on_connection_close() to clean up after the client closes the connection (but see that method’s docstring for caveats).