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I’ve been working on a web app using Django, and I’m curious if there is a way to schedule a job to run periodically.
Basically I just want to run through the database and make some calculations/updates on an automatic, regular basis, but I can’t seem to find any documentation on doing this.
Does anyone know how to set this up?
To clarify: I know I can set up a cron job to do this, but I’m curious if there is some feature in Django that provides this functionality. I’d like people to be able to deploy this app themselves without having to do much config (preferably zero).
I’ve considered triggering these actions “retroactively” by simply checking if a job should have been run since the last time a request was sent to the site, but I’m hoping for something a bit cleaner.
Answer #1:
One solution that I have employed is to do this:
1) Create a custom management command, e.g.
python manage.py my_cool_command
2) Use cron (on Linux) or at (on Windows) to run my command at the required times.
This is a simple solution that doesn’t require installing a heavy AMQP stack. However there are nice advantages to using something like Celery, mentioned in the other answers. In particular, with Celery it is nice to not have to spread your application logic out into crontab files. However the cron solution works quite nicely for a small to medium sized application and where you don’t want a lot of external dependencies.
EDIT:
In later version of windows the at command is deprecated for Windows 8, Server 2012 and above. You can use schtasks.exe for same use.
**** UPDATE ****
This the new link of django doc for writing the custom management command
Answer #2:
Celery is a distributed task queue, built on AMQP (RabbitMQ). It also handles periodic tasks in a cron-like fashion (see periodic tasks). Depending on your app, it might be worth a gander.
Celery is pretty easy to set up with django (docs), and periodic tasks will actually skip missed tasks in case of a downtime. Celery also has built-in retry mechanisms, in case a task fails.
Answer #3:
We’ve open-sourced what I think is a structured app. that Brian’s solution above alludes too. We would love any / all feedback!
https://github.com/tivix/django-cron
It comes with one management command:
./manage.py runcrons
That does the job. Each cron is modeled as a class (so its all OO) and each cron runs at a different frequency and we make sure the same cron type doesn’t run in parallel (in case crons themselves take longer time to run than their frequency!)
Answer #4:
If you’re using a standard POSIX OS, you use cron.
If you’re using Windows, you use at.
Write a Django management command to
-
Figure out what platform they’re on.
-
Either execute the appropriate “AT” command for your users, or update the crontab for your users.
Answer #5:
Interesting new pluggable Django app: django-chronograph
You only have to add one cron entry which acts as a timer, and you have a very nice Django admin interface into the scripts to run.
Answer #6:
Look at Django Poor Man’s Cron which is a Django app that makes use of spambots, search engine indexing robots and alike to run scheduled tasks in approximately regular intervals
Answer #7:
I had exactly the same requirement a while ago, and ended up solving it using APScheduler (User Guide)
It makes scheduling jobs super simple, and keeps it independent for from request-based execution of some code. Following is a simple example.
from apscheduler.schedulers.background import BackgroundScheduler
scheduler = BackgroundScheduler()
job = None
def tick():
print('One tick!')
def start_job():
global job
job = scheduler.add_job(tick, 'interval', seconds=3600)
try:
scheduler.start()
except:
pass
Hope this helps somebody!
Answer #8:
Brian Neal’s suggestion of running management commands via cron works well, but if you’re looking for something a little more robust (yet not as elaborate as Celery) I’d look into a library like Kronos:
# app/cron.py
import kronos
@kronos.register('0 * * * *')
def task():
pass
