How to create a new thread in Python

Difficulty Level : Medium
Last Updated : 10 May, 2020

Threads in python is an entity within a process that can be scheduled for execution. In simpler words, a thread is a computation process that is to be performed by a computer. It is a sequence of such instructions within a program that can be executed independently of other codes.

In python there are two ways to create a new Thread. In this article we will also be making use of the threading module in Python. Below is a detailed list of those processes:

1. Creating python threads using class:

Below has a coding example followed by the code explanation for creating new threads using class in python.

# import the threading module 
import threading  
  
class thread(threading.Thread):  
    def __init__(self, thread_name, thread_ID):  
        threading.Thread.__init__(self)  
        self.thread_name = thread_name  
        self.thread_ID = thread_ID  
  
        # helper function to execute the threads 
    def run(self):  
        print(str(self.thread_name) +" "+ str(self.thread_ID));  
  
thread1 = thread("GFG", 1000)  
thread2 = thread("GeeksforGeeks", 2000);  
  
thread1.start()  
thread2.start()  
  
print("Exit")  

Output:

GFG 1000
GeeksforGeeks 2000
Exit

Now let’s look into what we did up there in the code.

We created a sub-class of the thread class.
Then we overrode the __init__ function of the thread class.
then we overrode the run method to define the behavior of the thread.
The start() method starts a Python thread.

1. Creating python threads using function:

The below code shows the creation of new thread using a function:

from threading import Thread 
from time import sleep 
  
# function to create threads 
def threaded_function(arg): 
    for i in range(arg): 
        print("running") 
          
        # wait 1 sec in between each thread 
        sleep(1) 
  
  
if __name__ == "__main__": 
    thread = Thread(target = threaded_function, args = (10, )) 
    thread.start() 
    thread.join() 
    print("thread finished...exiting") 

Output:

running
running
running
running
running
running
running
running
running
running
thread finished...exiting

So what we did in the above code,

We defined a function to create a thread.
Then we used the threading module to create a thread that invoked the function as its target.
Then we used start() method to start the Python thread.

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