How to create Periodic Tasks in Celery?

Celery provides asynchronous job queues, which allows you to run Python functions in the background. Celery is on the Python Package Index (PyPi), and can be easily installed with pip or easy_install and its dependencies.

$ pip install django-celery && pip install redis

Celery uses a broker to pass messages between your application and Celery worker processes. We are having like rabbitmq, redis but we are using redis as a broker in this article. To initiate a task, an application will adds a message to the queue, which the broker then delivers to a worker.

So we can install redis using the following command:;

sudo apt-get install redis-server

Setting up celery in your project:

1. We need to add 'djcelery' into your project Installed Apps.

    INSTALLED_APPS += (
        'djcelery',
    )

2. To configure celery, we are using redis broker which is easy to install, lightweight, fast:

    import djcelery
    djcelery.setup_loader()
    BROKER_URL = 'redis://localhost:6379/1'

3. We should specify imports i.e from where tasks are being loaded using CELERY_IMPORTS command in settings.py file

    CELERY_IMPORTS = ("testapp.tasks")

4. Celery Periodic Task means which runs at a regular intervals of time. These periodic tasks are scheduled by a celery beat which will executed by a worker.

• You can set the interval of time using crontab, timedelta. By Using time delta function, we can run a task at particular point of time, day like 

     timedelta(seconds=30)

     timedelta(minutes=30),

     timedelta(minutes=*/5) --> which will execute at every 5 minutes

• Like with cron, the tasks may overlap if the first task does not complete before the next.

     crontab(0, 0, day_of_month='23') --> which will execute on the 23rd day of the every month.

     crontab(minute='*/5') --> which will execute at every 5 minutes

     crontab(hour='*', minute='5', day_of_week='mon') --> which will execute for every 5 minutes on mon

5. We can setup celery periodic tasks settings using celery beat schedular.

    from celery.schedules import crontab

    CELERY_TIMEZONE = "Asia/Calcutta"

    CELERYBEAT_SCHEDULER = "djcelery.schedulers.DatabaseScheduler"

    CELERYBEAT_SCHEDULE = {
        # Executes for every 5 minutes on mon,tue,wed,thu,fri,sat
        'add-every-day-evening': {
            'task': 'testapp.tasks.load_messages_into_database',
            'schedule': crontab(hour='*', minute='5', day_of_week='mon,tue,wed,thu,fri,sat'),
        },
    }

    You need to ensure that scheduling tasks run with a single schedular only, otherwise it leads to duplicate tasks which runs by multiple schedulers at the same time.