"AttributeError: module 'asyncio' has no attribute 'coroutine'" — fixing the Python 3.11 removal

You bumped a Lambda function (or any service) to Python 3.11 or later and something that used to run now dies on import or at call time with:

AttributeError: module 'asyncio' has no attribute 'coroutine'

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Nothing about your business logic changed. A decorator your code — or a dependency your code imports — relies on simply isn’t there anymore.

Why this happens

@asyncio.coroutine was the generator-based way to write coroutines before Python got native async/await syntax in 3.5. It let a regular generator function (using yield from instead of await) act like a coroutine for the event loop.

Once async def became the standard, @asyncio.coroutine was kept around for backward compatibility, but it was deprecated in Python 3.8 with an explicit DeprecationWarning, and then removed outright in Python 3.11. Calling asyncio.coroutine on 3.11+ doesn’t warn — it fails immediately, because the attribute no longer exists on the module.

This tends to surface in two places:

1. Old code in your own repo written before async/await syntax was idiomatic, or copy-pasted from a pre-2018 tutorial.
2. A dependency that still ships generator-based coroutines internally and hasn’t been updated for years.

Either way, it’s a runtime-upgrade trigger, not a logic bug: the code was already deprecated-but-working on 3.8–3.10, and the 3.11 bump is what turns the warning into a hard failure.

Fix — rewrite as native async/await

The generator-based pattern and the native one map directly onto each other.

Before (removed in 3.11):

import asyncio

@asyncio.coroutine
def fetch_data(url):
    response = yield from some_legacy_fetch(url)
    return response

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After (native coroutine):

async def fetch_data(url):
    response = await some_legacy_fetch(url)
    return response

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The mechanical rule: @asyncio.coroutine + def becomes async def; every yield from inside becomes await. If the function being awaited is itself still generator-based (yield from all the way down), it needs the same treatment — the conversion has to reach the bottom of the call chain, not just the outer function, or you’ll hit a TypeError for awaiting a non-awaitable instead.

If the code isn’t yours

Run:

python3 -c "import asyncio; print(asyncio.__file__)"
grep -rn "asyncio.coroutine\|@coroutine" $(python3 -c "import site; print(site.getsitepackages()[0])")

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or more simply, install the dependency into a Python 3.11+ virtualenv and see which import fails first — that’s usually the exact package to upgrade. Most actively maintained async libraries dropped @asyncio.coroutine years before 3.11 removed it, so this is almost always solved by a pip install --upgrade <package>, not a patch you have to write yourself. Genuinely abandoned dependencies are the harder case: fork-and-fix, or find a maintained replacement before the runtime upgrade, not after.

Catch it before the deploy, not after

Because the failure only fires when the affected code path actually runs, a quick smoke test on 3.11+ locally (or in CI, before flipping the Lambda runtime label) catches it long before a cold start does it for you in production:

python3.11 -W error::DeprecationWarning -c "import your_module"

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Running with -W error::DeprecationWarning on your current runtime (3.9/3.10) first will also surface this and similar removals as warnings before you ever touch 3.11 — turning a hard failure after upgrade into a fixable warning before it.

This is one of several stdlib removals that show up as cryptic AttributeErrors the moment a Lambda function moves off an EOL Python runtime — the free EOLkits scanner flags every deprecated runtime in an account in about 30 seconds, nothing uploaded, and I maintain it. Full reference for this exact error: eolkits.com/fix/python-asyncio-has-no-attribute-coroutine.