Recover from task failed beyond max_retries - django

Question

I am attempting to asynchronously consume a web service because it takes up to 45 seconds to return. Unfortunately, this web service is also somewhat unreliable and can throw errors. I have set up django-celery and have my tasks executing, which works fine until the task fails beyond max_retries.
Here is what I have so far:
#task(default_retry_delay=5, max_retries=10)
def request(xml):
try:
server = Client('https://www.whatever.net/RealTimeService.asmx?wsdl')
xml = server.service.RunRealTimeXML(
username=settings.WS_USERNAME,
password=settings.WS_PASSWORD,
xml=xml
)
except Exception, e:
result = Result(celery_id=request.request.id, details=e.reason, status="i")
result.save()
try:
return request.retry(exc=e)
except MaxRetriesExceededError, e:
result = Result(celery_id=request.request.id, details="Max Retries Exceeded", status="f")
result.save()
raise
result = Result(celery_id=request.request.id, details=xml, status="s")
result.save()
return result
Unfortunately, MaxRetriesExceededError is not being thrown by retry(), so I'm not sure how to handle the failure of this task. Django has already returned HTML to the client, and I am checking the contents of Result via AJAX, which is never getting to a full fail f status.
So the question is: How can I update my database when the Celery task has exceeded max_retries?

Answer 1

The issue is that celery is trying to re-raise the exception you passed in when it hits the retry limit. The code for doing this re-raising is here: https://github.com/celery/celery/blob/v3.1.20/celery/app/task.py#L673-L681
The simplest way around this is to just not have celery manage your exceptions at all:
#task(max_retries=10)
def mytask():
try:
do_the_thing()
except Exception as e:
try:
mytask.retry()
except MaxRetriesExceededError:
do_something_to_handle_the_error()
logger.exception(e)

Answer 2

You can override the after_return method of the celery task class, this method is called after the execution of the task whatever is the ret status (SUCCESS,FAILED,RETRY)
class MyTask(celery.task.Task)
def run(self, xml, **kwargs)
#Your stuffs here
def after_return(self, status, retval, task_id, args, kwargs, einfo=None):
if self.max_retries == int(kwargs['task_retries']):
#If max retries are equals to task retries do something
if status == "FAILURE":
#You can do also something if the tasks fail instead of check the retries
http://readthedocs.org/docs/celery/en/latest/reference/celery.task.base.html#celery.task.base.BaseTask.after_return
http://celery.readthedocs.org/en/latest/reference/celery.app.task.html?highlight=after_return#celery.app.task.Task.after_return

Answer 3

With Celery version 2.3.2 this approach has worked well for me:
class MyTask(celery.task.Task):
abstract = True
def after_return(self, status, retval, task_id, args, kwargs, einfo):
if self.max_retries == self.request.retries:
#If max retries is equal to task retries do something
#task(base=MyTask, default_retry_delay=5, max_retries=10)
def request(xml):
#Your stuff here

Answer 4

I'm just going with this for now, spares me the work of subclassing Task and is easily understood.
# auto-retry with delay as defined below. After that, hook is disabled.
#celery.shared_task(bind=True, max_retries=5, default_retry_delay=300)
def post_data(self, hook_object_id, url, event, payload):
headers = {'Content-type': 'application/json'}
try:
r = requests.post(url, data=payload, headers=headers)
r.raise_for_status()
except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
if self.request.retries >= self.max_retries:
log.warning("Auto-deactivating webhook %s for event %s", hook_object_id, event)
Webhook.objects.filter(object_id=hook_object_id).update(active=False)
return False
raise self.retry(exc=e)
return True