Update 03/05/2022: The github project has been updated to work with latest version of Django (4.0.4) and Python (3.10): https://github.com/spapas/django-test-rq
Update 01/09/15: I’ve written a new post about rq and django with some more advanced techniques !
Introduction
Job queuing (asynchronous tasks) is a common requirement for non-trivial django projects. Whenever an operation can take more than half a second it should be put to a job queue in order to be run asynchronously by a seperate worker. This is really important since the response to a user request needs to be immediate or else the users will experience laggy behavior and start complaining! Even for fairly quick tasks (like sending email through an SMTP server) you need to use an asynchronous task if you care about your users since the time required for such a task is not really limited.
Using job queues is involved not only for the developers of the application (who need to create the asynchronous tasks and give feedback to the users when the’ve finished since they can’t use the normal HTTP response) and but also for the administrators, since, in order to support job queues at least two more componets will be needed:
- One job queue that will store the jobs to be executed next in a first in first queue. This could be the normal database of the project however it’s not recommended for performance reasons and most of thetimes it is a specific component called “Message Broker”
- One (or more) workers that will monitor the job queue and when there is work to do they will dequeue and execute it
These can all run in the same server but if it gets saturated they can easily be seperated (even more work for administrators).
Beyond job queuing, another relative requirement for many projects is to schedule a task to be run in the future (similar to the at unix command) or at specific time intervals (similar to the cron unix command). For instance, if a user is registered today we may need to check after one or two days if he’s logged in and used our application - if he hasn’t then probably he’s having problems and we can call him to help him. Also, we could check every night to see if any users that have registered to our application don’t have activated their account through email activation and delete these accounts. Scheduled tasks should be also run by the workers mentioned above.
Job queues in python
The most known application for using job queues in python is celery which is a really great project that supports many brokers, integrates nicely with python/django (but can be used even with other languages) and has many more features (most of them are only useful on really big, enterprise projects). I’ve already used it in a previous application, however, because celery is really complex I found it rather difficult to configure it successfully and I never was perfectly sure that my asynchronous task would actually work or that I’d used the correct configuration for my needs!
Celery also has many dependencies in order to be able to talk with the different broker backends it supports, improve multithreading support etc. They may be required in enterprise apps but not for most Django web based projects.
So, for small-to-average projects I recommend using a different asynchronous task solution instead of celery, particularly (as you’ve already guessed from the title of this post) RQ. RQ is simpler than celery, it integrates great with django using the excellent django-rq package and doesn’t actually have any more dependencies beyond redis support which is used as a broker (however most modern django projects already use redis for their caching needs as an alternative to memcached).
It even supports supports job scheduling through the rq-scheduler package (celery also supports job scheduling through celery beat): Run a different process (scheduler) that polls the job scheduling queue for any jobs that need to be run because of scheduling and if yes put them to the normal job queue.
Although RQ and frieds are really easy to use (and have nice documentation) I wasn’t able to find a complete example of using it with django, so I’ve implemented one (found at https://github.com/spapas/django-test-rq — since I’ve updated this project a bit with new stuff, please checkout tag django-test-rq-simple git checkout django-test-rq-simple) mainly for my own testing purposes. To help others that want to also use RQ in their project but don’t know from where to start, I’ll present it in the following paragraphs, along with some comments on how to actually use RQ in your production environment.
django-test-rq
This is a simple django project that can be used to asynchronously run and schedule jobs and examine their behavior. The job to be scheduled just downloads a provided URL and counts its length. There is only one django application (tasks) that contains two views, one to display existing tasks and create new ones and one to display some info for the jobs.
models.py
Two models (Task and ScheduledTask) for saving individual tasks and scheduled tasks and one model (ScheduledTaskInstance) to save scheduled instances of each scheduled task.
from django.db import models
import requests
from rq import get_current_job
class Task(models.Model):
# A model to save information about an asynchronous task
created_on = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
name = models.CharField(max_length=128)
job_id = models.CharField(max_length=128)
result = models.CharField(max_length=128, blank=True, null=True)
class ScheduledTask(models.Model):
# A model to save information about a scheduled task
created_on = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
name = models.CharField(max_length=128)
# A scheduled task has a common job id for all its occurences
job_id = models.CharField(max_length=128)
class ScheduledTaskInstance(models.Model):
# A model to save information about instances of a scheduled task
scheduled_task = models.ForeignKey('ScheduledTask')
created_on = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
result = models.CharField(max_length=128, blank=True, null=True)
forms.py
A very simple form to create a new task.
from django import forms
class TaskForm(forms.Form):
""" A simple form to read a url from the user in order to find out its length
and either run it asynchronously or schedule it schedule_times times,
every schedule_interval seconds.
"""
url = forms.CharField(label='URL', max_length=128, help_text='Enter a url (starting with http/https) to start a job that will download it and count its words' )
schedule_times = forms.IntegerField(required=False, help_text='How many times to run this job. Leave empty or 0 to run it only once.')
schedule_interval = forms.IntegerField(required=False, help_text='How much time (in seconds) between runs of the job. Leave empty to run it only once.')
def clean(self):
data = super(TaskForm, self).clean()
schedule_times = data.get('schedule_times')
schedule_interval = data.get('schedule_interval')
if schedule_times and not schedule_interval or not schedule_times and schedule_interval:
msg = 'Please fill both schedule_times and schedule_interval to schedule a job or leave them both empty'
self.add_error('schedule_times', msg)
self.add_error('schedule_interval', msg)
views.py
This is actually very simple if you’re familiar with Class Based Views. Two CBVs are defined, one for the Task form + Task display and another for the Job display.
from django.views.generic.edit import FormView
from django.views.generic import TemplateView
from forms import TaskForm
from tasks import get_url_words, scheduled_get_url_words
from models import Task,ScheduledTask
from rq.job import Job
import django_rq
import datetime
class TasksHomeFormView(FormView):
"""
A class that displays a form to read a url to read its contents and if the job
is to be scheduled or not and information about all the tasks and scheduled tasks.
When the form is submitted, the task will be either scheduled based on the
parameters of the form or will be just executed asynchronously immediately.
"""
form_class = TaskForm
template_name = 'tasks_home.html'
success_url = '/'
def form_valid(self, form):
url = form.cleaned_data['url']
schedule_times = form.cleaned_data.get('schedule_times')
schedule_interval = form.cleaned_data.get('schedule_interval')
if schedule_times and schedule_interval:
# Schedule the job with the form parameters
scheduler = django_rq.get_scheduler('default')
job = scheduler.schedule(
scheduled_time=datetime.datetime.now(),
func=scheduled_get_url_words,
args=[url],
interval=schedule_interval,
repeat=schedule_times,
)
else:
# Just execute the job asynchronously
get_url_words.delay(url)
return super(TasksHomeFormView, self).form_valid(form)
def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
ctx = super(TasksHomeFormView, self).get_context_data(**kwargs)
ctx['tasks'] = Task.objects.all().order_by('-created_on')
ctx['scheduled_tasks'] = ScheduledTask.objects.all().order_by('-created_on')
return ctx
class JobTemplateView(TemplateView):
"""
A simple template view that gets a job id as a kwarg parameter
and tries to fetch that job from RQ. It will then print all attributes
of that object using __dict__.
"""
template_name = 'job.html'
def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
ctx = super(JobTemplateView, self).get_context_data(**kwargs)
redis_conn = django_rq.get_connection('default')
try:
job = Job.fetch(self.kwargs['job'], connection=redis_conn)
job = job.__dict__
except:
job = None
ctx['job'] = job
return ctx
tasks.py
Here two jobs are defined: One to be used for simple asynchronous tasks and the other to be used for scheduled asynchronous tasks (since for asynchronous tasks we wanted to group their runs per job id).
The @job decorator will add the delay() method (used in views.py) to the function. It’s not really required for scheduled_get_url_words since it’s called through the scheduled.schedule.
When a task is finished, it can return a value (like we do in return task.result) which will be saved for a limited amount of time (500 seconds by default - could be even saved for ever) to redis. This may be useful in some cases, however, I think that for normal web applications it’s not that useful, and since here we use normal django models for each task, we can save it to that model’s instance instead.
import requests
from models import Task, ScheduledTask, ScheduledTaskInstance
from rq import get_current_job
from django_rq import job
@job
def get_url_words(url):
# This creates a Task instance to save the job instance and job result
job = get_current_job()
task = Task.objects.create(
job_id=job.get_id(),
name=url
)
response = requests.get(url)
task.result = len(response.text)
task.save()
return task.result
@job
def scheduled_get_url_words(url):
"""
This creates a ScheduledTask instance for each group of
scheduled task - each time this scheduled task is run
a new instance of ScheduledTaskInstance will be created
"""
job = get_current_job()
task, created = ScheduledTask.objects.get_or_create(
job_id=job.get_id(),
name=url
)
response = requests.get(url)
response_len = len(response.text)
ScheduledTaskInstance.objects.create(
scheduled_task=task,
result = response_len,
)
return response_len
settings.py
import os
BASE_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.dirname(__file__))
SECRET_KEY = '123'
DEBUG = True
TEMPLATE_DEBUG = True
ALLOWED_HOSTS = []
INSTALLED_APPS = (
'django.contrib.admin',
'django.contrib.auth',
'django.contrib.contenttypes',
'django.contrib.sessions',
'django.contrib.messages',
'django.contrib.staticfiles',
'django_extensions',
'django_rq',
'tasks',
)
MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware',
'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
'django.contrib.auth.middleware.SessionAuthenticationMiddleware',
'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware',
'django.middleware.clickjacking.XFrameOptionsMiddleware',
)
ROOT_URLCONF = 'django_test_rq.urls'
WSGI_APPLICATION = 'django_test_rq.wsgi.application'
DATABASES = {
'default': {
'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
'NAME': os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'db.sqlite3'),
}
}
LANGUAGE_CODE = 'en-us'
TIME_ZONE = 'UTC'
USE_I18N = True
USE_L10N = True
USE_TZ = True
STATIC_URL = '/static/'
# Use redis for caches
CACHES = {
"default": {
"BACKEND": "django_redis.cache.RedisCache",
"LOCATION": "redis://127.0.0.1:6379/0",
"OPTIONS": {
"CLIENT_CLASS": "django_redis.client.DefaultClient",
}
}
}
# Use the same redis as with caches for RQ
RQ_QUEUES = {
'default': {
'USE_REDIS_CACHE': 'default',
},
}
SESSION_ENGINE = "django.contrib.sessions.backends.cache"
SESSION_CACHE_ALIAS = "default"
RQ_SHOW_ADMIN_LINK = True
# Add a logger for rq_scheduler in order to display when jobs are queueud
LOGGING = {
'version': 1,
'disable_existing_loggers': False,
'formatters': {
'simple': {
'format': '%(asctime)s %(levelname)s %(message)s'
},
},
'handlers': {
'console': {
'level': 'DEBUG',
'class': 'logging.StreamHandler',
'formatter': 'simple'
},
},
'loggers': {
'django.request': {
'handlers': ['console'],
'level': 'DEBUG',
'propagate': True,
},
'rq_scheduler': {
'handlers': ['console'],
'level': 'DEBUG',
'propagate': True,
},
},
}
By default, rq_scheduler won’t log anything so we won’t be able to see any output when new instances of each scheduled task are queued for execution. That’s why we’ve overriden the LOGGING setting in order to actually log rq_scheduler output to the console.
Running the project
I recommend using Vagrant to start a stock ubuntu/trusty32 box. After that, install redis, virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper and create/activate a virtualenv named rq. You can go to the home directory of django-test-rq and install requirements through pip install requirements.txt and create the database tables with python manage.py migrate. Finally you may run the project with python manage.py runserver_plus.
rqworker and rqscheduler
Before scheduling any tasks we need to run two more processes:
- rqworker: This is a worker that dequeues jobs from the queue and executes them. We could run more than one onstance of this job if we need it.
- rqscheduler: This is a process that runs every one minute and checks if there are scheduled jobs that have to be executed. If yes, it will add them to the queue in order to be executed by a worker.
For development
If you want to run rqworker and rqscheduler for your development environment you can just do it with running python manage.py rqworker and python mange.py rqscheduler through screen/tmux. If everything is allright you should see tasks being added to the queue and scheduled (you may need to refresh the homepage before seeing everything since a task may be executed after the response is created).
Also, keep in mind that rqscheduler runs once every minute by default so you may need to wait up to minute to see a ScheduledTask instance. Also, this means that you can’t run more than one scheduled task instance per minute.
For production
Trying to create daemons through screen is not sufficient for a production envornment since we’d like to actually have logging, monitoring and of course automatically start rqworker and rqscheduler when the server boots.
For this, I recommend using the supervisord tool which can be used to monitor and control a number of processes. There are other similar tools, however I’ve found supervisord the easier to use.
In order to monitor/control a process through supervisord you need to add a [program:progrname] section in supervisord’s configuration and pass a number of parameters. The progname is the name of the monitoring process. Here’s how rqworker can be configured using supervisord:
[program:rqworker] command=python manage.py rqworker directory=/vagrant/progr/py/rq/django-test-rq environment=PATH="/home/vagrant/.virtualenvs/rq/bin" user=vagrant
The options used will chdir to directory and execute command as user. The environment option can be used to set envirotnment variables - here we set PATH in order to use a specific virtual environment. This will allow you to monitor rqworker through supervisord and log its output to a file in /var/log/supervisor (by default). A similar entry needs to be added for rqscheduler of course. If everything has been configured correctly, when you reload the supervisord settings you can run sudo /usr/bin/supervisorctl and should see something like
rqscheduler RUNNING pid 1561, uptime 0:00:03 rqworker RUNNING pid 1562, uptime 0:00:03
Also, tho log files should contain some debug info.
Conclusion
Although using job queues makes it more difficult for the developer and adds at least one (and probably more) points of failure to a project (the workers, the broker etc) their usage, even for very simple projects is unavoidable.
Unless a complex, enterprise solution like celery is really required for a project I recommend using the much simpler and easier to configure RQ for all your asynchronous and scheduled task needs. Using RQ (and the relative projects django-rq and rq-scheduler) we can easily add production ready queueued and scheduled jobs to any django project.
In this article we presented a small introduction to RQ and its friends and saw how to configure django to use it in a production ready environment using a small django project (https://github.com/spapas/django-test-rq) which was implemented as a companion to help readers quickly test the concepts presented here.