If the server returns a cursorId of 0, indicating that the query's results are completely fetched, neither Cursor nor CommandCursor sets its "alive" property to False. This has been true since "alive" was first introduced, and for the whole history of CommandCursor. So code like the following always looped past the end of the result set and raised StopIteration:

cursor = my_collection.aggregate(
    pipeline,
    cursor={}
)

while cursor.alive:
    print(cursor.next())  # or next(cursor)

To fix this issue we update Cursor and CommandCursor to set "alive" False when they get an id of 0 from the server.

However, you still shouldn't iterate with "while cursor.alive", because that loop can still raise StopIteration. If the final batch ends right at a batch_size boundary, then it will have a non-zero cursor id, but the next batch will be empty and have a cursor_id of 0. In this example there are two batches of 2 documents each, and then a final batch with zero documents:

>>> collection.count()
4
>>> cursor = collection.find().batch_size(2)
>>> cursor.next()
{u'_id': ObjectId('5531564cca1ce94a93c904a1')}
>>> len(cursor._Cursor__data)
1
>>> cursor.cursor_id
30137392801
>>> cursor.next()
{u'_id': ObjectId('5531564cca1ce94a93c904a2')}
>>> len(cursor._Cursor__data)
0
>>> cursor.cursor_id
30137392801
>>> cursor.next()
{u'_id': ObjectId('5531564cca1ce94a93c904a3')}
>>> len(cursor._Cursor__data)
1
>>> cursor.cursor_id
30137392801
>>> cursor.next()
{u'_id': ObjectId('5531564cca1ce94a93c904a4')}
>>> cursor.cursor_id
30137392801
>>> cursor.next()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "pymongo/cursor.py", line 983, in __next__
    raise StopIteration
StopIteration

So, even though the cursor has an id when we call next(), it raises StopIteration because the server sends a final, empty batch.

In conclusion, just use a for loop:

for document in cursor:
    print(document)

This is perfectly safe with Cursors and CommandCursors.