What’s new in Tornado 6.5.0

May 15, 2025

Security Improvements

  • Previously, malformed multipart-form-data requests could log multiple warnings and constitute a denial-of-service attack. Now an exception is raised at the first error, so there is only one log message per request. This fixes CVE-2025-47287.

General Changes

  • Python 3.14 is now supported. Older versions of Tornado will work on Python 3.14 but may log deprecation warnings.

  • The free-threading mode of Python 3.13 is now supported on an experimental basis. Prebuilt wheels are not yet available for this configuration, but it can be built from source.

  • The minimum supported Python version is 3.9.

Deprecation Notices

  • Support for obs-fold continuation lines in HTTP headers is deprecated and will be removed in Tornado 7.0, as is the use of carriage returns without line feeds as header separators.

  • The callback argument to websocket_connect is deprecated and will be removed in Tornado 7.0. Note that on_message_callback is not deprecated.

  • The log_message and args attributes of tornado.web.HTTPError are deprecated. Use the new get_message method instead.

Type Annotation Changes

tornado.httputil

  • Support for obs-fold continuation lines in HTTP headers is deprecated and will be removed in Tornado 7.0, as is the use of carriage returns without line feeds as header separators.

  • Request start lines may no longer include control characters.

  • Method names containing invalid characters now return error code 400 instead of 405.

  • Header names are now restricted to the set of characters permitted by the RFCs.

  • Control characters are no longer allowed in (incoming) header values.

  • Handling of trailing whitespace in headers has been improved, especially with obs-fold continuation lines.

  • The Host header is now restricted to the set of characters permitted by the RFCs. It is now an error to send more than one Host header, or to omit a Host header for a request that is not using HTTP/1.0.

tornado.ioloop

  • Fixed a bug in which contextvars that were set when the event loop was created were not available inside the event loop on Windows.

tornado.netutil

tornado.platform.twisted

  • TwistedResolver has been deleted. It was already deprecated and scheduled for removal in Tornado 7.0, but due to the adoption of RFC 8482 it no longer works for most domain names. This class was primarily intended to provide thread-free non-blocking DNS resolution. If that is still required, tornado.platform.caresresolver is the next best option, although it has its own limitations which differ from TwistedResolver, and it is also deprecated. Most users should switch to the default resolver, which uses threads.

tornado.web

  • The set of characters allowed in (outgoing) HTTP headers now matches the RFCs. Specifically, tab characters are now allowed and DEL is not.

  • Invalid If-Modified-Since headers are now ignored instead of causing a 500 error.

  • % characters in the log message of tornado.web.HTTPError are no longer doubled when no additional arguments are passed. This matches the behavior of logging.LogRecord. A new method get_message has been added to HTTPError to allow access to the fully-substituted message; directly accessing log_message and args is deprecated.

tornado.websocket

  • Some bugs involving ping_interval and ping_timeout have been fixed. Setting the ping_timeout greater than the ping_interval is no longer supported. The default ping_timeout is now equal to the ping_interval.

  • The callback argument to websocket_connect is deprecated and will be removed in Tornado 7.0. Note that on_message_callback is not deprecated.