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.
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
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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
See: http://code.google.com/p/django-poormanscron/
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!
Django APScheduler for Scheduler Jobs. Advanced Python Scheduler (APScheduler) is a Python library that lets you schedule your Python code to be executed later, either just once or periodically. You can add new jobs or remove old ones on the fly as you please.
note: I'm the author of this library
Install APScheduler
pip install apscheduler
View file function to call
file name: scheduler_jobs.py
def FirstCronTest():
print("")
print("I am executed..!")
Configuring the scheduler
make execute.py file and add the below codes
from apscheduler.schedulers.background import BackgroundScheduler
scheduler = BackgroundScheduler()
Your written functions Here, the scheduler functions are written in scheduler_jobs
import scheduler_jobs
scheduler.add_job(scheduler_jobs.FirstCronTest, 'interval', seconds=10)
scheduler.start()
Link the File for Execution
Now, add the below line in the bottom of Url file
import execute
You can check the full code by executing
[Click here]
https://github.com/devchandansh/django-apscheduler
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
RabbitMQ and Celery have more features and task handling capabilities than Cron. If task failure isn't an issue, and you think you will handle broken tasks in the next call, then Cron is sufficient.
Celery & AMQP will let you handle the broken task, and it will get executed again by another worker (Celery workers listen for the next task to work on), until the task's max_retries attribute is reached. You can even invoke tasks on failure, like logging the failure, or sending an email to the admin once the max_retries has been reached.
And you can distribute Celery and AMQP servers when you need to scale your application.
I personally use cron, but the Jobs Scheduling parts of django-extensions looks interesting.
Although not part of Django, Airflow is a more recent project (as of 2016) that is useful for task management.
Airflow is a workflow automation and scheduling system that can be used to author and manage data pipelines. A web-based UI provides the developer with a range of options for managing and viewing these pipelines.
Airflow is written in Python and is built using Flask.
Airflow was created by Maxime Beauchemin at Airbnb and open sourced in the spring of 2015. It joined the Apache Software Foundation’s incubation program in the winter of 2016. Here is the Git project page and some addition background information.
Put the following at the top of your cron.py file:
#!/usr/bin/python
import os, sys
sys.path.append('/path/to/') # the parent directory of the project
sys.path.append('/path/to/project') # these lines only needed if not on path
os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'myproj.settings'
# imports and code below
I just thought about this rather simple solution:
Define a view function do_work(req, param) like you would with any other view, with URL mapping, return a HttpResponse and so on.
Set up a cron job with your timing preferences (or using AT or Scheduled Tasks in Windows) which runs curl http://localhost/your/mapped/url?param=value.
You can add parameters but just adding parameters to the URL.
Tell me what you guys think.
[Update] I'm now using runjob command from django-extensions instead of curl.
My cron looks something like this:
#hourly python /path/to/project/manage.py runjobs hourly
... and so on for daily, monthly, etc'. You can also set it up to run a specific job.
I find it more managable and a cleaner. Doesn't require mapping a URL to a view. Just define your job class and crontab and you're set.
after the part of code,I can write anything just like my views.py :)
#######################################
import os,sys
sys.path.append('/home/administrator/development/store')
os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE']='store.settings'
from django.core.management impor setup_environ
from store import settings
setup_environ(settings)
#######################################
from
http://www.cotellese.net/2007/09/27/running-external-scripts-against-django-models/
You should definitely check out django-q!
It requires no additional configuration and has quite possibly everything needed to handle any production issues on commercial projects.
It's actively developed and integrates very well with django, django ORM, mongo, redis. Here is my configuration:
# django-q
# -------------------------------------------------------------------------
# See: http://django-q.readthedocs.io/en/latest/configure.html
Q_CLUSTER = {
# Match recommended settings from docs.
'name': 'DjangoORM',
'workers': 4,
'queue_limit': 50,
'bulk': 10,
'orm': 'default',
# Custom Settings
# ---------------
# Limit the amount of successful tasks saved to Django.
'save_limit': 10000,
# See https://github.com/Koed00/django-q/issues/110.
'catch_up': False,
# Number of seconds a worker can spend on a task before it's terminated.
'timeout': 60 * 5,
# Number of seconds a broker will wait for a cluster to finish a task before presenting it again. This needs to be
# longer than `timeout`, otherwise the same task will be processed multiple times.
'retry': 60 * 6,
# Whether to force all async() calls to be run with sync=True (making them synchronous).
'sync': False,
# Redirect worker exceptions directly to Sentry error reporter.
'error_reporter': {
'sentry': RAVEN_CONFIG,
},
}
Yes, the method above is so great. And I tried some of them. At last, I found a method like this:
from threading import Timer
def sync():
do something...
sync_timer = Timer(self.interval, sync, ())
sync_timer.start()
Just like Recursive.
Ok, I hope this method can meet your requirement. :)
A more modern solution (compared to Celery) is Django Q:
https://django-q.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
It has great documentation and is easy to grok. Windows support is lacking, because Windows does not support process forking. But it works fine if you create your dev environment using the Windows for Linux Subsystem.
I had something similar with your problem today.
I didn't wanted to have it handled by the server trhough cron (and most of the libs were just cron helpers in the end).
So i've created a scheduling module and attached it to the init .
It's not the best approach, but it helps me to have all the code in a single place and with its execution related to the main app.
I use celery to create my periodical tasks. First you need to install it as follows:
pip install django-celery
Don't forget to register django-celery in your settings and then you could do something like this:
from celery import task
from celery.decorators import periodic_task
from celery.task.schedules import crontab
from celery.utils.log import get_task_logger
#periodic_task(run_every=crontab(minute="0", hour="23"))
def do_every_midnight():
#your code
I am not sure will this be useful for anyone, since I had to provide other users of the system to schedule the jobs, without giving them access to the actual server(windows) Task Scheduler, I created this reusable app.
Please note users have access to one shared folder on server where they can create required command/task/.bat file. This task then can be scheduled using this app.
App name is Django_Windows_Scheduler
ScreenShot:
If you want something more reliable than Celery, try TaskHawk which is built on top of AWS SQS/SNS.
Refer: http://taskhawk.readthedocs.io
For simple dockerized projects, I could not really see any existing answer fit.
So I wrote a very barebones solution without the need of external libraries or triggers, which runs on its own. No external os-cron needed, should work in every environment.
It works by adding a middleware: middleware.py
import threading
def should_run(name, seconds_interval):
from application.models import CronJob
from django.utils.timezone import now
try:
c = CronJob.objects.get(name=name)
except CronJob.DoesNotExist:
CronJob(name=name, last_ran=now()).save()
return True
if (now() - c.last_ran).total_seconds() >= seconds_interval:
c.last_ran = now()
c.save()
return True
return False
class CronTask:
def __init__(self, name, seconds_interval, function):
self.name = name
self.seconds_interval = seconds_interval
self.function = function
def cron_worker(*_):
if not should_run("main", 60):
return
# customize this part:
from application.models import Event
tasks = [
CronTask("events", 60 * 30, Event.clean_stale_objects),
# ...
]
for task in tasks:
if should_run(task.name, task.seconds_interval):
task.function()
def cron_middleware(get_response):
def middleware(request):
response = get_response(request)
threading.Thread(target=cron_worker).start()
return response
return middleware
models/cron.py:
from django.db import models
class CronJob(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=10, primary_key=True)
last_ran = models.DateTimeField()
settings.py:
MIDDLEWARE = [
...
'application.middleware.cron_middleware',
...
]
Simple way is to write a custom shell command see Django Documentation and execute it using a cronjob on linux. However i would highly recommend using a message broker like RabbitMQ coupled with celery. Maybe you can have a look at
this Tutorial
One alternative is to use Rocketry:
from rocketry import Rocketry
from rocketry.conds import daily, after_success
app = Rocketry()
#app.task(daily.at("10:00"))
def do_daily():
...
#app.task(after_success(do_daily))
def do_after_another():
...
if __name__ == "__main__":
app.run()
It also supports custom conditions:
from pathlib import Path
#app.cond()
def file_exists(file):
return Path(file).exists()
#app.task(daily & file_exists("myfile.csv"))
def do_custom():
...
And it also supports Cron:
from rocketry.conds import cron
#app.task(cron('*/2 12-18 * Oct Fri'))
def do_cron():
...
It can be integrated quite nicely with FastAPI and I think it could be integrated with Django as well as Rocketry is essentially just a sophisticated loop that can spawn, async tasks, threads and processes.
Disclaimer: I'm the author.
Another option, similar to Brian Neal's answer it to use RunScripts
Then you don't need to set up commands. This has the advantage of more flexible or cleaner folder structures.
This file must implement a run() function. This is what gets called when you run the script. You can import any models or other parts of your django project to use in these scripts.
And then, just
python manage.py runscript path.to.script
What are ways to send automatic weekly email notifications to users upon any update or changes in the data in a django project ?
I'll describe the simplest solution I'm aware of. There are also much, much more sophisticated approaches to this problem.
Fundamentally, you need three things:
A task runner (I recommend configuring cron jobs with django-kronos)
An SMTP provider (I recommend Mailgun, which is super simple to set up with Django and gives you some test credits out of the box).
Email templates (write yourself & render to string w/ Django -- Mailgun has some good open source templates as well on their blog)
Example: django-kronos provides decorators for registering functions as cron jobs (this assumes your web server is Linux-based). These jobs can be installed as part of your deploy process from the command line:
./manage.py installtasks
For kronos to find tasks, they must be located in cron.py files inside of your apps.
# myapp/cron.py
import kronos
from django.contrib.auth.models import user
from myapp.services import check_for_changes, notify_user_of_change
# Register cron job to run once a week (every Sunday) at midnight
#kronos.register('0 0 * * 0')
def notify_about_changes():
"""Sets up a cron job and runs this service function once a day.
Installed With:
``./manage.py installtasks``
"""
all_my_users = User.objects.all()
for user in all_my_users:
changes = check_for_changes(user)
for change in changes:
notify_user_of_change(user, change)
Note that it's a good practice to keep your task function as "thin" as possible. In your case, you're (a) checking for changes, then (b) notifying about each change. These could each be a function that accepts a user instance as a param, or they could be model methods. In any case, the hard work should be handled elsewhere.
This is a very broad question, so unfortunately the answer is going to be broad as well. The general workflow you're looking for probably starts off with a Signal which you can set up to be activated on update of data.
That signal would then store data about the changes and then use one of many different email options to send email. You could use either built-in Django emails, or use a 3rd party API such as django-mailchimp.
Hopefully this gets you headed in the right direction.
How to make Django execute something automatically at a particular time.?
For example, my django application has to ftp upload to remote servers at pre defined times. The ftp server addresses, usernames, passwords, time, day and frequency has been defined in a django model.
I want to run a file upload automatically based on the values stored in the model.
One way to do is to write a python script and add it to the crontab. This script runs every minute and keeps an eye on the time values defined in the model.
Other thing that I can roughly think of is maybe django signals. I'm not sure if they can handle this issue. Is there a way to generate signals at predefined times (Haven't read indepth about them yet).
Just for the record - there is also celery which allows to schedule messages for the future dispatch. It's, however, a different beast than cron, as it requires/uses RabbitMQ and is meant for message queues.
I have been thinking about this recently and have found django-cron which seems as though it would do what you want.
Edit: Also if you are not specifically looking for Django based solution, I have recently used scheduler.py, which is a small single file script which works well and is simple to use.
I've had really good experiences with django-chronograph.
You need to set one crontab task: to call the chronograph python management command, which then runs other custom management commands, based on an admin-tweakable schedule
The problem you're describing is best solved using cron, not Django directly. Since it seems that you need to store data about your ftp uploads in your database (using Django to access it for logs or graphs or whatever), you can make a python script that uses Django which runs via cron.
James Bennett wrote a great article on how to do this which you can read in full here: http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2007/sep/22/standalone-django-scripts/
The main gist of it is that, you can write standalone django scripts that cron can launch and run periodically, and these scripts can fully utilize your Django database, models, and anything else they want to. This gives you the flexibility to run whatever code you need and populate your database, while not trying to make Django do something it wasn't meant to do (Django is a web framework, and is event-driven, not time-driven).
Best of luck!
How do people deploy/version control cronjobs to production? I'm more curious about conventions/standards people use than any particular solution, but I happen to be using git for revision control, and the cronjob is running a python/django script.
If you are using Fabric for deploment you could add a function that edits your crontab.
def add_cronjob():
run('crontab -l > /tmp/crondump')
run('echo "#daily /path/to/dostuff.sh 2> /dev/null" >> /tmp/crondump')
run('crontab /tmp/crondump')
This would append a job to your crontab (disclaimer: totally untested and not very idempotent).
Save the crontab to a tempfile.
Append a line to the tmpfile.
Write the crontab back.
This is propably not exactly what you want to do but along those lines you could think about checking the crontab into git and overwrite it on the server with every deploy. (if there's a dedicated user for your project.)
Using Fabric, I prefer to keep a pristine version of my crontab locally, that way I know exactly what is on production and can easily edit entries in addition to adding them.
The fabric script I use looks something like this (some code redacted e.g. taking care of backups):
def deploy_crontab():
put('crontab', '/tmp/crontab')
sudo('crontab < /tmp/crontab')
You can also take a look at:
http://django-fab-deploy.readthedocs.org/en/0.7.5/_modules/fab_deploy/crontab.html#crontab_update
django-fab-deploy module has a number of convenient scripts including crontab_set and crontab_update
You can probably use something like CFEngine/Chef for deployment (it can deploy everything - including cron jobs)
However, if you ask this question - it could be that you have many production servers each running large number of scheduled jobs.
If this is the case, you probably want a tool that can not only deploy jobs, but also track success failure, allow you to easily look at logs from the last run, run statistics, allow you to easily change the schedule for many jobs and servers at once (due to planned maintenance...) etc.
I use a commercial tool called "UC4". I don't really recommend it, so I hope you can find a better program that can solve the same problem. I'm just saying that administration of jobs doesn't end when you deploy them.
There are really 3 options of manually deploying a crontab if you cannot connect your system up to a configuration management system like cfengine/puppet.
You could simply use crontab -u user -e but you run the risk of someone having an error in their copy/paste.
You could also copy the file into the cron directory but there is no syntax checking for the file and in linux you must run touch /var/spool/cron in order for crond to pickup the changes.
Note Everyone will forget the touch command at some point.
In my experience this method is my favorite manual way of deploying a crontab.
diff /var/spool/cron/<user> /var/tmp/<user>.new
crontab -u <user> /var/tmp/<user>.new
I think the method I mentioned above is the best because you don't run the risk of copy/paste errors which helps you maintain consistency with your version controlled file. It performs syntax checking of the cron tasks inside of the file, and you won't need to perform the touch command as you would if you were to simply copy the file.
Having your project under version control, including your crontab.txt, is what I prefer. Then, with Fabric, it is as simple as this:
#task
def crontab():
run('crontab deployment/crontab.txt')
This will install the contents of deployment/crontab.txt to the crontab of the user you connect to the server. If you dont have your complete project on the server, you'd want to put the crontab file first.
If you're using Django, take a look at the jobs system from django-command-extensions.
The benefits are that you can keep your jobs inside your project structure, with version control, write everything in Python and configure crontab only once.
I use Buildout to manage my Django projects. With Buildout, I use z3c.recipe.usercrontab to install cron jobs in deploy or update.
You said:
I'm more curious about conventions/standards people use than any particular solution
But, to be fair, the particular solution will depend in your environment and there is no universal elegant silver bullet. Given that you happen to be using Python/Django, I recommend Celery. It is an asynchronous task queue for Python, which integrates nicely with Django. And, on top of the features that it gives as an asynchronous task queue, it also has specific features for periodic tasks.
I have personally used the django-celery-beat integration and it integrates perfectly with Django settings and behaves correctly in distributed environments. If your periodic tasks are related to Django stuff, I strongly recommend to take a look at Celery I started using it only for certain asynchronous mailing and ended up using it for a lot of asynchronous tasks + periodic sanity checks and other web application maintenance stuff.