got a simple question, I believe, but it got me stuck anyways.
Say I have a simple model:
class myModel(models.Model):
expires = models.DateTimeField(...)
and I want, say on the specified time do something: send an email, delete model, change some of the models fields... Something. Is there a tool in django core, allowing me to do so?
Or, if not, I think some task queuing tool might be in order. I have djcelery working in my project, though I'm a completely newbie in it, and all I was able to perform so far, is to run django-celery-email package, in order to send my mail asynchronically. Though I can't say I'm fully capable of defining task and workers to work in background and be reliable.
If any ideas, on how to solve such problem, please, do not hesitate =)
Write a custom management command to do the task that you desire. When you are done, you should be able to run your task with python manage.py yourtaskname.
Use cron, at, periodic tasks in celery, django-cron, djangotaskscheduler or django-future to schedule your tasks.
I think the best is a background-task the reads the datime and executes a task if a datetime is or has been reached.
See the solution given here for a scheduled task
So the workflow would be:
Create the task you want to apply on objects whose date has been reached
Create a managment command that checks the datetimes in your DB, and execute the above task for every object the datetime has been reached
Use cron (Linux) or at(Windows) to schedule the command call
If you're on a UNIX-like machine, it's possible that you have access to cronjobs. If you're on Windows, I hear there's a program called at that can do similar things. If this doesn't suit your needs, there are a number of ways to do things every X hours using the time library (time.sleep(SOME_NUMBER_OF_SECONDS) in a loop with whatever else you want to do will do it if you want something done regularly, otherwise you'll need to look at time.localtime() and check for conditions).
Related
Suppose I have a model Event. I want to send a notification (email, push, whatever) to all invited users once the event has elapsed. Something along the lines of:
class Event(models.Model):
start = models.DateTimeField(...)
end = models.DateTimeField(...)
invited = models.ManyToManyField(model=User)
def onEventElapsed(self):
for user in self.invited:
my_notification_backend.sendMessage(target=user, message="Event has elapsed")
Now, of course, the crucial part is to invoke onEventElapsed whenever timezone.now() >= event.end.
Keep in mind, end could be months away from the current date.
I have thought about two basic ways of doing this:
Use a periodic cron job (say, every five minutes or so) which checks if any events have elapsed within the last five minutes and executes my method.
Use celery and schedule onEventElapsed using the eta parameter to be run in the future (within the models save method).
Considering option 1, a potential solution could be django-celery-beat. However, it seems a bit odd to run a task at a fixed interval for sending notifications. In addition I came up with a (potential) issue that would (probably) result in a not-so elegant solution:
Check every five minutes for events that have elapsed in the previous five minutes? seems shaky, maybe some events are missed (or others get their notifications send twice?). Potential workaroung: add a boolean field to the model that is set to True once notifications have been sent.
Then again, option 2 also has its problems:
Manually take care of the situation when an event start/end datetime is moved. When using celery, one would have to store the taskID (easy, ofc) and revoke the task once the dates have changed and issue a new task. But I have read, that celery has (design-specific) problems when dealing with tasks that are run in the future: Open Issue on github. I realize how this happens and why it is everything but trivial to solve.
Now, I have come across some libraries which could potentially solve my problem:
celery_longterm_scheduler (But does this mean I cannot use celery as I would have before, because of the differend Scheduler class? This also ties into the possible usage of django-celery-beat... Using any of the two frameworks, is it still possible to queue jobs (that are just a bit longer-running but not months away?)
django-apscheduler, uses apscheduler. However, I was unable to find any information on how it would handle tasks that are run in the far future.
Is there a fundemantal flaw with the way I am approaching this? Im glad for any inputs you might have.
Notice: I know this is likely to be somehwat opinion based, however, maybe there is a very basic thing that I have missed, regardless of what could be considered by some as ugly or elegant.
We're doing something like this in the company i work for, and the solution is quite simple.
Have a cron / celery beat that runs every hour to check if any notification needs to be sent.
Then send those notifications and mark them as done. This way, even if your notification time is years ahead, it will still be sent. Using ETA is NOT the way to go for a very long wait time, your cache / amqp might loose the data.
You can reduce your interval depending on your needs, but do make sure they dont overlap.
If one hour is too huge of a time difference, then what you can do is, run a scheduler every hour. Logic would be something like
run a task (lets call this scheduler task) hourly that gets all notifications that needs to be sent in the next hour (via celery beat) -
Schedule those notifications via apply_async(eta) - this will be the actual sending
Using that methodology would get you both of best worlds (eta and beat)
I have been looking for a solution for my app that does not seem to be directly discussed anywhere. My goal is to publish an app and have it reach out, automatically, to a server I am working with. This just needs to be a simple Post. I have everything working fine, and am currently solving this problem with a cron job, but it is not quite sufficient - I would like the job to execute automatically once the app has been published, not after a minute (or whichever the specified time it may be set to).
In concept I am trying to have my app register itself with my server and to do this I'd like for it to run once on publish and never be ran again.
Is there a solution to this problem? I have looked at Task Queues and am unsure if it is what I am looking for.
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
Personally, this makes more sense to me as a responsibility of your deploy process, rather than of the app itself. If you have your own deploy script, add the post request there (after a successful deploy). If you use google's command line tools, you could wrap that in a script. If you use a 3rd party tool for something like continuous integration, they probably have deploy hooks you could use for this purpose.
The main question will be how to ensure it only runs once for a particular version.
Here is an outline on how you might approach it.
You create a HasRun module, which you use store each the version of the deployed app and this indicates if the one time code has been run.
Then make sure you increment your version, when ever you deploy your new code.
In you warmup handler or appengine_config.py grab the version deployed,
then in a transaction try and fetch the new HasRun entity by Key (version number).
If you get the Entity then don't run the one time code.
If you can not find it then create it and run the one time code, either in a task (make sure the process is idempotent, as tasks can be retried) or in the warmup/front facing request.
Now you will probably want to wrap all of that in memcache CAS operation to provide a lock or some sort. To prevent some other instance trying to do the same thing.
Alternately if you want to use the task queue, consider naming the task the version number, you can only submit a task with a particular name once.
It still needs to be idempotent (again could be scheduled to retry) but there will only ever be one task scheduled for that version - at least for a few weeks.
Or a combination/variation of all of the above.
Im currently making a program that would send random text messages at randomly generated times during the day. I first made my program in python and then realized that if I would like other people to sign up to receive messages, I would have to use some sort of online framework. (If anyone knowns a way to use my code in python without having to change it that would be amazing, but for now I have been trying to use web2py) I looked into scheduler but it does not seem to do what I have in mind. If anyone knows if there is a way to pass a time value into a function and have it run at that time, that would be great. Thanks!
Check out the Apscheduler module for cron-like scheduling of events in python - In their example it shows how to schedule some python code to run in a cron'ish way.
Still not sure about the random part though..
As for a web framework that may appeal to you (seeing you are familiar with Python already) you should really look into Django (or to keep things simple just use WSGI).
Best.
I think that actually you can use Scheduler and Tasks of web2py. I've never used it ;) but the documentation describes creation of a task to which you can pass parameters from your code - so something you need - and it should work fine for your needs:
scheduler.queue_task('mytask', start_time=myrandomtime)
So you need web2py's cron job, running every day and firing code similar to the above for each message to be sent (passing parameters you need, possibly message content and phone number, see examples in web2py book). This would be a daily creation of tasks which would be processed later by the scheduler.
You can also have a simpler solution, one daily cron job which prepares the queue of messages with random times for the next day and the second one which runs every, like, ten minutes, checks what awaits to be processed and sends messages. So, no Tasks. This way is a bit ugly though (consider a single processing which takes more then 10 minutes). You may also want to have and check some statuses of the messages to be processed (like pending, ongoing, done) to prevent a situation in which two jobs are working on the same message and to allow tracking progress of the processing. Anyway, you could use the cron method it in an early version of your software and later replace it by a better method :)
In any case, you should check expected number of messages to process and average processing time on your target platform - to make sure that the chosen method is quick enough for your needs.
This is an old question but in case someone is interested, the answer is APScheduler blocking scheduler with jobs set to run in regular intervals with some jitter
See: https://apscheduler.readthedocs.io/en/3.x/modules/triggers/interval.html
I'm fairly competent with Python but I've never 'uploaded code' to a server before and have it run automatically.
I'm working on a project that would require some code to be running 24/7. At certain points of the day, if a criteria is met, a process is started. For example: a database may contain records of what time each user wants to receive a daily newsletter (for some subjective reason) - the code would at the right time of day send the newsletter to the correct person. But of course, all of this is running out on a Cloud server.
Any help would be appreciated - even correcting my entire formulation of the problem! If you know how to do this in any other language - please reply with your solutions!
Thanks!
Here are two approaches to this problem, both of which require shell access to the cloud server.
Write the program to handle the scheduling itself. For example, sleep and wake up every few miliseconds to perform the necessary checks. You would then transfer this file to the server using a tool like scp, login, and start it in the background using something like python myscript.py &.
Write the program to do a single run only, and use the scheduling tool cron to start it up every minute of the day.
Took a few days but I finally got a way to work this out. The most practical way to get this working is to use a VPS that runs the script. The confusing part of my code was that each user would activate the script at a different time for themselves. To do this, say at midnight, the VPS runs the python script (using scheduled tasking or something similar) and runs the script. the script would then pull times from a database and process the code at those times outlined.
Thanks for your time anyways!
My application creates PeriodicTask objects according to user-defined schedules. That is, the schedule for the PeriodicTask can change at any time. The past couple days have been spent in frustration trying to figure out how to get Celery to support this. Ultimately, the issue is that, for something to run as a PeriodicTask it first, has to be created and then second, has to be registered (I have no idea why this is required).
So, for dynamic tasks to work, I need
to register all the tasks when the celery server starts
to register a task when it is newly created.
#1 should be solved easily enough by running a startup script (i.e., something that gets run after ./manage.py celerybeat gets called). Unfortunately, I don't think there's a convenient place to put this. If there were, the script would go something like this:
from djcelery.models import PeriodicTask
from celery.registry import tasks
for task in PeriodicTask.objects.filter(name__startswith = 'scheduler.'):
tasks.register(task)
I'm filtering for 'scheduler.' because the names of all my dynamic tasks begin that way.
#2 I have no idea. The issue so far as I see it is that celery.registry.tasks is kept in memory and there's no way, barring some coding magic, to access the celerybeat's tasks registry once it started running.
Thanks in advance for your help.