I'm in need of a way to execute external long running processes from a web app written in Django and Python.
Right now I'm using Supervisord and the API. My problem with this solution is that it's very static. I need to build the commands from my app instead of having to pre configure Supervisord with all possible commands. The argument and the command is dynamic.
I need to execute the external process, save a pid/identifier and later be able to check if it's still alive and running and stop the process.
I've found https://github.com/mnaberez/supervisor_twiddler to add processes on the fly to supervisord. Maybe that's the best way to go?
Any other ideas how to best solve this problem?
I suggest you have a look at this post:
Processing long-running Django tasks using Celery + RabbitMQ + Supervisord + Monit
As the title says, there are a few additional components involved (mainly celery and rabbitMQ), but these are good and proven technologies for this kind of requirement.
Related
I'm building a web app using a Django framework. There isn't much user interaction with only a few static links, navbar, and a few plots which come from my app itself. The main part of the app comes from a python script which reads data from an external source, does some data processing on it, and then writes to my django database. Then after writing to the database a new page is created with information about the database entry. Note that there is no user interaction so no starting or stopping the task. I want the task to run in the background 24/7.
Thus far I've looked into celery and django-background-tasks. Celery seems like a bit much for my use case. I don't think I need a broker service as I just want to run 1 task which the user will never interact with. Additionally, I don't need multiple workers. Django-background-tasks seems like a good lightweight alternative but it seems it does not support indefinite tasks without having to refresh the task every once in a while (ideally I don't want this). Is there a tool that is better suited for this use case? Or am I just completely misunderstanding celery and django-background-tasks.
Update
Thanks for the comments, everyone! So I looked up what was mentioned by #D Malan and I think a tool like Supervisord might fit my use case. That is I can run a python script separately from the django application in the background and then have the python script interact with the django application. The only problem I have now is getting the process to interact with the django app. #deceze mentioned invoking a manage command from the python script. So this would involve creating a subprocess from the python script calling a custom django management command which updates my database? Or can I use the django.core.management.call_command but from a python file separate from the django application. If this is the case how would it know where to get the command from?
I have a web application that runs locally only (does not run on a remote server). The web application is basically just a ui to adjust settings and see some information about the main application. Web UI was used as opposed to a native application due to portability and ease of development. Now, in order to start and stop the main application, I want to achieve this through a button in the web application. However, I couldn't find a suitable way to start a asynchronous and managed task locally. I saw there is a library called celery, however that seems to be suitable to a distributed environment, which mine is not.
My main need to be able to start/stop the task, as well as the check if the task is running (so I can display that in the ui). Is there any way to achieve this?
celery can work just fine locally. Distributed is just someone else's computer after all :)
You will have to install all the same requirements and the like. You can kick off workers by hand, or as a service, just like in the celery docs.
I've been able to deploy a test application by using pyramid with pserve and running pceleryd (I just send an email without blocking while it is sent).
But there's one point that I don't understand: I want to run my application with mod_wsgi, and I don't understand if I can can do it without having to run pceleryd from a shell, but if I can do something in the virtualhost configuration.
Is it possible? How?
There are technically ways you could use Apache/mod_wsgi to manage a process distinct from that handling web requests, but the pain point is that Celery will want to fork off further worker processes. Forking further processes from a process managed by Apache can cause problems at times and so is not recommended.
You are thus better of starting up Celery process separately. One option is to use supervisord to start it up and manage it.
I want to give celery a try. I'm interested in a simple way to schedule crontab-like tasks, similar to Spring's quartz.
I see from celery's documentation that it requires running celeryd as a daemon process. Is there a way to refrain from running another external process and simply running this embedded in my django instance? Since I'm not interested in distributing the work at the moment, I'd rather keep it simple.
Add CELERY_ALWAYS_EAGER=True option in your django settings file and all your tasks will be executed locally. Seems like for the periodic tasks you have to execute celery beat as well.
To give a little background, I'm writing (or am going to write) a daemon in Python for scheduling tasks to run at user-specified dates. The scheduler daemon also needs to have a JSON-based HTTP web service interface (buzzword mania, I know) for adding tasks to the queue and monitoring the scheduler's status. The interface needs to receive requests while the daemon is running, so they either need to run in a separate thread or cooperatively multitask somehow. Ideally the web service interface should run in the same process as the daemon, too.
I could think of a few ways to do it, but I'm wondering if there's some obvious module out there that's specifically tailored for this kind of thing. Any suggestions about what to use, or about the project in general are quite welcome. Thanks! :)
Check out the class BaseHTTPServer -- a "Basic HTTP server" bundled with Python.
http://docs.python.org/library/basehttpserver.html
You can spin up a second thread and have it serve your requests for you very easily (probably < 30 lines of code). And it all runs in the same process and Python interpreter space, so it can access all your objects, etc.
I'm not sure I understand your question properly, but take a look at Twisted
I believed all kinds of python web framework is useful.
You can pick up one like CherryPy, which is small enough to integrate into your system. Also CherryPy includes a pure python WSGI server for production.
Also the performance may not be as good as apache, but it's already very stable.
Don't re-invent the bicycle!
Run jobs via cron script, and create a separate web interface using, for example, Django or Tornado.
Connect them via a database. Even sqlite will do the job if you don't want to scale on more machines.