Scheduled Tasks in Django

When building applications, the need for certain background tasks comes into place.

Some of these tasks may be sending emails on a schedule, updating a model field or something else

In Django, we have several options to settle this need but our main concern for this post will be on apscheduler

This tutorial deals with showing you how to schedule tasks using APScheduler in Django

Installation

pip install apscheduler

When the installation is done, add apscheduler to requirements.txt

Creating task

Here we are going to create the task to be executed in a task.py file

def do_some_task():
  #background taskto do
  pass

When the task has been created, we move to the scheduling part

Scheduling the task

It is not time to schedule the task in a new scheduled.py file

from apscheduler.shedulers.background import BackgroundScheduler
from .task import do_some_task

def start_task():

    scheduler = BackgroundScheduler()
    scheduler.add_job(do_some_task, 'interval', minutes=30)
    scheduler.start()

we want this task to run on a specific interval so we included 'interval'. other choices to use include

date: use when you want to run the job just once at a certain point in time

interval: use when you want to run the job at fixed intervals of time

cron: use when you want to run the job periodically at a certain time(s) of the day

Final steps

we have created the task and also set it to run at intervals, now we have to let django see the task, we call this in our apps.py

Note: apps.py, scheduled.py and task.py are in the same Django app

class ProfilesConfig(AppConfig):
    default_auto_field = "django.db.models.BigAutoField"
    name = "profiles"

    def ready(self):
        from . import scheduled
        scheduled.start_task()

Thanks.

Scheduled Tasks in Django

Using APScheduler to schedule tasks in a Django application

Table of contents

Installation

Creating task

Scheduling the task

Final steps