Testing for the existence of a Flask request context

I just finished reviewing a pull request that contained an extraneous statement inside a try block.

Here's the code in question:

try:
    if signature not in g._celery_tasks:
        g._celery_tasks.append(signature)
except RuntimeError:
    signature()

While this code works fine, the RuntimeError being caught is expected to be raised when g._celery_tasks is accessed. Because g is a werkzeug.LocalProxy object, the exception is raised if there is no active request context. My concern was that if the next line raised a RuntimeError, it would also be caught. As this is not the intent of this handler catching such an error would be unexpected behavior.

PEP8 briefly addresses this as well, under Programming Recommendations:

[...] for all try/except clauses, limit the try clause to the absolute minimum amount of code necessary. Again, this avoids masking bugs.

When I got to this point I suddenly lost the ability to Python, and had to turn to the Internet for assistance. After some research, I asked for help in #pocoo on Freenode. Here's the result:

from flask import _app_ctx_stack

if _app_ctx_stack.top is None:
    print("Not in a request context")

This not only allows us to move that spurious line of code from the try block, but also to completely prevent the RuntimeError from being thrown.

from flask import _app_ctx_stack as context_stack

if context_stack.top is None:
    signature()
elif signature not in g._celery_tasks:
    tasks.append(signature)

Since my cursory search for an easy way to determine if a request context were active wasn't very helpful, I decided to go ahead and document my method here.

My thanks to mattupstate for the recommendation on IRC. If you're feeling generous, please consider supporting him on Gratipay.