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How to write python script to run automatically at 11:30 pm everyday? [duplicate]

I've been working on a web app using Django, and I'm curious if there is a way to schedule a job to run periodically.
Basically I just want to run through the database and make some calculations/updates on an automatic, regular basis, but I can't seem to find any documentation on doing this.
Does anyone know how to set this up?
To clarify: I know I can set up a cron job to do this, but I'm curious if there is some feature in Django that provides this functionality. I'd like people to be able to deploy this app themselves without having to do much config (preferably zero).
I've considered triggering these actions "retroactively" by simply checking if a job should have been run since the last time a request was sent to the site, but I'm hoping for something a bit cleaner.

One solution that I have employed is to do this:
1) Create a custom management command, e.g.
python manage.py my_cool_command
2) Use cron (on Linux) or at (on Windows) to run my command at the required times.
This is a simple solution that doesn't require installing a heavy AMQP stack. However there are nice advantages to using something like Celery, mentioned in the other answers. In particular, with Celery it is nice to not have to spread your application logic out into crontab files. However the cron solution works quite nicely for a small to medium sized application and where you don't want a lot of external dependencies.
EDIT:
In later version of windows the at command is deprecated for Windows 8, Server 2012 and above. You can use schtasks.exe for same use.
**** UPDATE ****
This the new link of django doc for writing the custom management command

Celery is a distributed task queue, built on AMQP (RabbitMQ). It also handles periodic tasks in a cron-like fashion (see periodic tasks). Depending on your app, it might be worth a gander.
Celery is pretty easy to set up with django (docs), and periodic tasks will actually skip missed tasks in case of a downtime. Celery also has built-in retry mechanisms, in case a task fails.

We've open-sourced what I think is a structured app. that Brian's solution above alludes too. We would love any / all feedback!
https://github.com/tivix/django-cron
It comes with one management command:
./manage.py runcrons
That does the job. Each cron is modeled as a class (so its all OO) and each cron runs at a different frequency and we make sure the same cron type doesn't run in parallel (in case crons themselves take longer time to run than their frequency!)

If you're using a standard POSIX OS, you use cron.
If you're using Windows, you use at.
Write a Django management command to
Figure out what platform they're on.
Either execute the appropriate "AT" command for your users, or update the crontab for your users.

Interesting new pluggable Django app: django-chronograph
You only have to add one cron entry which acts as a timer, and you have a very nice Django admin interface into the scripts to run.

Look at Django Poor Man's Cron which is a Django app that makes use of spambots, search engine indexing robots and alike to run scheduled tasks in approximately regular intervals
See: http://code.google.com/p/django-poormanscron/

I had exactly the same requirement a while ago, and ended up solving it using APScheduler (User Guide)
It makes scheduling jobs super simple, and keeps it independent for from request-based execution of some code. Following is a simple example.
from apscheduler.schedulers.background import BackgroundScheduler
scheduler = BackgroundScheduler()
job = None
def tick():
print('One tick!')\
def start_job():
global job
job = scheduler.add_job(tick, 'interval', seconds=3600)
try:
scheduler.start()
except:
pass
Hope this helps somebody!

Django APScheduler for Scheduler Jobs. Advanced Python Scheduler (APScheduler) is a Python library that lets you schedule your Python code to be executed later, either just once or periodically. You can add new jobs or remove old ones on the fly as you please.
note: I'm the author of this library
Install APScheduler
pip install apscheduler
View file function to call
file name: scheduler_jobs.py
def FirstCronTest():
print("")
print("I am executed..!")
Configuring the scheduler
make execute.py file and add the below codes
from apscheduler.schedulers.background import BackgroundScheduler
scheduler = BackgroundScheduler()
Your written functions Here, the scheduler functions are written in scheduler_jobs
import scheduler_jobs
scheduler.add_job(scheduler_jobs.FirstCronTest, 'interval', seconds=10)
scheduler.start()
Link the File for Execution
Now, add the below line in the bottom of Url file
import execute
You can check the full code by executing
[Click here]
https://github.com/devchandansh/django-apscheduler

Brian Neal's suggestion of running management commands via cron works well, but if you're looking for something a little more robust (yet not as elaborate as Celery) I'd look into a library like Kronos:
# app/cron.py
import kronos
#kronos.register('0 * * * *')
def task():
pass

RabbitMQ and Celery have more features and task handling capabilities than Cron. If task failure isn't an issue, and you think you will handle broken tasks in the next call, then Cron is sufficient.
Celery & AMQP will let you handle the broken task, and it will get executed again by another worker (Celery workers listen for the next task to work on), until the task's max_retries attribute is reached. You can even invoke tasks on failure, like logging the failure, or sending an email to the admin once the max_retries has been reached.
And you can distribute Celery and AMQP servers when you need to scale your application.

I personally use cron, but the Jobs Scheduling parts of django-extensions looks interesting.

Although not part of Django, Airflow is a more recent project (as of 2016) that is useful for task management.
Airflow is a workflow automation and scheduling system that can be used to author and manage data pipelines. A web-based UI provides the developer with a range of options for managing and viewing these pipelines.
Airflow is written in Python and is built using Flask.
Airflow was created by Maxime Beauchemin at Airbnb and open sourced in the spring of 2015. It joined the Apache Software Foundation’s incubation program in the winter of 2016. Here is the Git project page and some addition background information.

Put the following at the top of your cron.py file:
#!/usr/bin/python
import os, sys
sys.path.append('/path/to/') # the parent directory of the project
sys.path.append('/path/to/project') # these lines only needed if not on path
os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'myproj.settings'
# imports and code below

I just thought about this rather simple solution:
Define a view function do_work(req, param) like you would with any other view, with URL mapping, return a HttpResponse and so on.
Set up a cron job with your timing preferences (or using AT or Scheduled Tasks in Windows) which runs curl http://localhost/your/mapped/url?param=value.
You can add parameters but just adding parameters to the URL.
Tell me what you guys think.
[Update] I'm now using runjob command from django-extensions instead of curl.
My cron looks something like this:
#hourly python /path/to/project/manage.py runjobs hourly
... and so on for daily, monthly, etc'. You can also set it up to run a specific job.
I find it more managable and a cleaner. Doesn't require mapping a URL to a view. Just define your job class and crontab and you're set.

after the part of code,I can write anything just like my views.py :)
#######################################
import os,sys
sys.path.append('/home/administrator/development/store')
os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE']='store.settings'
from django.core.management impor setup_environ
from store import settings
setup_environ(settings)
#######################################
from
http://www.cotellese.net/2007/09/27/running-external-scripts-against-django-models/

You should definitely check out django-q!
It requires no additional configuration and has quite possibly everything needed to handle any production issues on commercial projects.
It's actively developed and integrates very well with django, django ORM, mongo, redis. Here is my configuration:
# django-q
# -------------------------------------------------------------------------
# See: http://django-q.readthedocs.io/en/latest/configure.html
Q_CLUSTER = {
# Match recommended settings from docs.
'name': 'DjangoORM',
'workers': 4,
'queue_limit': 50,
'bulk': 10,
'orm': 'default',
# Custom Settings
# ---------------
# Limit the amount of successful tasks saved to Django.
'save_limit': 10000,
# See https://github.com/Koed00/django-q/issues/110.
'catch_up': False,
# Number of seconds a worker can spend on a task before it's terminated.
'timeout': 60 * 5,
# Number of seconds a broker will wait for a cluster to finish a task before presenting it again. This needs to be
# longer than `timeout`, otherwise the same task will be processed multiple times.
'retry': 60 * 6,
# Whether to force all async() calls to be run with sync=True (making them synchronous).
'sync': False,
# Redirect worker exceptions directly to Sentry error reporter.
'error_reporter': {
'sentry': RAVEN_CONFIG,
},
}

Yes, the method above is so great. And I tried some of them. At last, I found a method like this:
from threading import Timer
def sync():
do something...
sync_timer = Timer(self.interval, sync, ())
sync_timer.start()
Just like Recursive.
Ok, I hope this method can meet your requirement. :)

A more modern solution (compared to Celery) is Django Q:
https://django-q.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
It has great documentation and is easy to grok. Windows support is lacking, because Windows does not support process forking. But it works fine if you create your dev environment using the Windows for Linux Subsystem.

I had something similar with your problem today.
I didn't wanted to have it handled by the server trhough cron (and most of the libs were just cron helpers in the end).
So i've created a scheduling module and attached it to the init .
It's not the best approach, but it helps me to have all the code in a single place and with its execution related to the main app.

I use celery to create my periodical tasks. First you need to install it as follows:
pip install django-celery
Don't forget to register django-celery in your settings and then you could do something like this:
from celery import task
from celery.decorators import periodic_task
from celery.task.schedules import crontab
from celery.utils.log import get_task_logger
#periodic_task(run_every=crontab(minute="0", hour="23"))
def do_every_midnight():
#your code

I am not sure will this be useful for anyone, since I had to provide other users of the system to schedule the jobs, without giving them access to the actual server(windows) Task Scheduler, I created this reusable app.
Please note users have access to one shared folder on server where they can create required command/task/.bat file. This task then can be scheduled using this app.
App name is Django_Windows_Scheduler
ScreenShot:

If you want something more reliable than Celery, try TaskHawk which is built on top of AWS SQS/SNS.
Refer: http://taskhawk.readthedocs.io

For simple dockerized projects, I could not really see any existing answer fit.
So I wrote a very barebones solution without the need of external libraries or triggers, which runs on its own. No external os-cron needed, should work in every environment.
It works by adding a middleware: middleware.py
import threading
def should_run(name, seconds_interval):
from application.models import CronJob
from django.utils.timezone import now
try:
c = CronJob.objects.get(name=name)
except CronJob.DoesNotExist:
CronJob(name=name, last_ran=now()).save()
return True
if (now() - c.last_ran).total_seconds() >= seconds_interval:
c.last_ran = now()
c.save()
return True
return False
class CronTask:
def __init__(self, name, seconds_interval, function):
self.name = name
self.seconds_interval = seconds_interval
self.function = function
def cron_worker(*_):
if not should_run("main", 60):
return
# customize this part:
from application.models import Event
tasks = [
CronTask("events", 60 * 30, Event.clean_stale_objects),
# ...
]
for task in tasks:
if should_run(task.name, task.seconds_interval):
task.function()
def cron_middleware(get_response):
def middleware(request):
response = get_response(request)
threading.Thread(target=cron_worker).start()
return response
return middleware
models/cron.py:
from django.db import models
class CronJob(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=10, primary_key=True)
last_ran = models.DateTimeField()
settings.py:
MIDDLEWARE = [
...
'application.middleware.cron_middleware',
...
]

Simple way is to write a custom shell command see Django Documentation and execute it using a cronjob on linux. However i would highly recommend using a message broker like RabbitMQ coupled with celery. Maybe you can have a look at
this Tutorial

One alternative is to use Rocketry:
from rocketry import Rocketry
from rocketry.conds import daily, after_success
app = Rocketry()
#app.task(daily.at("10:00"))
def do_daily():
...
#app.task(after_success(do_daily))
def do_after_another():
...
if __name__ == "__main__":
app.run()
It also supports custom conditions:
from pathlib import Path
#app.cond()
def file_exists(file):
return Path(file).exists()
#app.task(daily & file_exists("myfile.csv"))
def do_custom():
...
And it also supports Cron:
from rocketry.conds import cron
#app.task(cron('*/2 12-18 * Oct Fri'))
def do_cron():
...
It can be integrated quite nicely with FastAPI and I think it could be integrated with Django as well as Rocketry is essentially just a sophisticated loop that can spawn, async tasks, threads and processes.
Disclaimer: I'm the author.

Another option, similar to Brian Neal's answer it to use RunScripts
Then you don't need to set up commands. This has the advantage of more flexible or cleaner folder structures.
This file must implement a run() function. This is what gets called when you run the script. You can import any models or other parts of your django project to use in these scripts.
And then, just
python manage.py runscript path.to.script

How to schedule a single-time event in Django in Heroku?

I have a question about the software design necessary to schedule an event that is going to be triggered once in the future in Heroku's distributed environment.
I believe it's better to write what I want to achieve, but I have certainly done my research and could not figure it out myself even after two hours of work.
Let's say in my views.py I have a function:
def after_6_hours():
print('6 hours passed.')
def create_game():
print('Game created')
# of course time will be error, but that's just an example
scheduler.do(after_6_hours, time=now + 6)
so what I want to achieve is to be able to run after_6_hours function exactly 6 hours after create_game has been invoked. Now, as you can see, this function is defined out of the usual clock.py or task.py or etc etc files.
Now, how can I have my whole application running in Heroku, all the time, and be able to add this job into the queue of this imaginary-for-now-scheduler library?
On a side note, I can't use Temporizer add-on of Heroku. The combination of APScheduler and Python rq looked promising, but examples are trivial, all scheduled on the same file within clock.py, and I just simply don't know how to tie everything together with the setup I have. Thanks in advance!

In Heroku you can have your Django application running in a Web Dyno, which will be responsible to serve your application and also to schedule the tasks.
For example (Please note that I did not test run the code):
Create after_hours.py, which will have the function you are going to schedule (note that we are going to use the same source code in worker too).
def after_6_hours():
print('6 hours passed.')
in your views.py using rq (note that rq alone is not enough in your situation as you have to schedule the task) and rq-scheduler:
from redis import Redis
from rq_scheduler import Scheduler
from datetime import timedelta
from after_hours import after_6_hours
def create_game():
print('Game created')
scheduler = Scheduler(connection=Redis()) # Get a scheduler for the "default" queue
scheduler.enqueue_in(timedelta(hours=6), after_6_hours) #schedules the job to run 6 hours later.
Calling create_game() should schedule after_6_hours() to run 6 hours later.
Hint: You can provision Redis in Heroku using Redis To Go add-on.
Next step is to run rqscheduler tool, which polls Redis every minute to see if there is any job to be executed at that time and places it in the queue(to which rq workers will be listening to).
Now, in a Worker Dyno create a file after_hours.py
def after_6_hours():
print('6 hours passed.')
#Better return something
And create another file worker.py:
import os
import redis
from rq import Worker, Queue, Connection
from after_hours import after_6_hours
listen = ['high', 'default', 'low'] # while scheduling the task in views.py we sent it to default
redis_url = os.getenv('REDISTOGO_URL', 'redis://localhost:6379')
conn = redis.from_url(redis_url)
if __name__ == '__main__':
with Connection(conn):
worker = Worker(map(Queue, listen))
worker.work()
and run this worker.py
python worker.py
That should run the scheduled task(afer_6_hours in this case) in Worker Dyno.
Please note that the key here is to make the same source code (after_hours.py in this case) available to worker too. The same is emphasized in rq docs
Make sure that the worker and the work generator share exactly the
same source code.
If it helps, there is a hint in the docs to deal with different code bases.
For cases where the web process doesn't have access to the source code
running in the worker (i.e. code base X invokes a delayed function
from code base Y), you can pass the function as a string reference,
too.
q = Queue('low', connection=redis_conn)
q.enqueue('my_package.my_module.my_func', 3, 4)
Hopefully rq-scheduler too respects this way of passing string instead of function object.
You can use any module/scheduling tool (Celery/RabbitMQ, APScheduler etc) as long as you understand this thing.

Web2Py - configure a scheduler

I have an application written in Web2Py that contains some modules. I need to call some functions out of a module on a periodic basis, say once daily. I have been trying to get a scheduler working for that purpose but am not sure how to get it working properly. I have referred to this and this to get started.
I have got a scheduler.py class in the models directory, which contains code like this:
from gluon.scheduler import Scheduler
from Module1 import Module1
def daily_task():
module1 = Module1()
module1.action1(arg1, arg2, arg3)
daily_task_scheduler = Scheduler(db, tasks=dict(my_daily_task=daily_task))
In default.py I have following code for the scheduler:
def daily_periodic_task():
daily_task_scheduler.queue_task('daily_running_task', repeats=0, period=60)
[for testing I am running it after 60 seconds, otherwise for daily I plan to use period=86400]
In my Module1.py class, I have this kind of code:
def action1(self, arg1, arg2, arg3):
for row in db().select(db.table1.ALL):
row.processed = 'processed'
row.update_record()
One of the issues I am facing is that I don't understand clearly how to make this scheduler work to automatically handle the execution of action1 on daily basis.
When I launch my application using syntax similar to: python web2py.py -K my_app it shows this in the console:
web2py Web Framework
Created by Massimo Di Pierro, Copyright 2007-2015
Version 2.11.2-stable+timestamp.2015.05.30.16.33.24
Database drivers available: sqlite3, imaplib, pyodbc, pymysql, pg8000
starting single-scheduler for "my_app"...
However, when I see the browser at:
http://127.0.0.1:8000/my_app/default/daily_periodic_task
I just see "None" as text displayed on the screen and I don't see any changes produced by the scheduled task in my database table.
While when I see the browser at:
http://127.0.0.1:8000/my_app/default/index
I get an error stating This web page is not available, basically indicating my application never got started.
When I start my application normally using python web2py.py my application loads fine but I don't see any changes produced by the scheduled task in my database table.
I am unable to figure out what I am doing wrong here and how to properly use the scheduler with Web2Py. Basically, I need to know how can I start my application normally alongwith the scheduled tasks properly running in background.
Any help in this regard would be highly appreciated.

Running python web2py.py starts the built-in web server, enabling web2py to respond to HTTP requests (i.e., serving web pages to a browser). This has nothing to do with the scheduler and will not result in any scheduled tasks being run.
To run scheduled tasks, you must start one or more background workers via:
python web2py.py -K myapp
The above does not start the built-in web server and therefore does not enable you to visit web pages. It simply starts a worker process that will be available to execute scheduled tasks.
Also, note that the above does not actually result in any tasks being scheduled. To schedule a task, you must insert a record in the db.scheduler_task table, which you can do via any of the usual methods of inserting records (including using appadmin) or programmatically via the scheduler.queue_task method (which is what you use in your daily_periodic_task action).
Note, you can simultaneously start the built-in web server and a scheduler worker process via:
python web2py.py -a yourpassword -K myapp -X
So, to schedule a daily task and have it actually executed, you need to (a) start a scheduler worker and (b) schedule the task. You can schedule the task by visiting your daily_periodic_task action, but note that you only need to visit that action once, as once the task has been scheduled, it remains in effect indefinitely (given that you have set repeats=0).
If the task does not appear to be working, it is possible there is something wrong with the task itself that is resulting in an error.

How can I create a web app in Flask that provides feedback to the user about the progress of a Celery task?

I am new to web app programming in general, and flask in particular. I am trying to create a "graphical" interface to some Python code I wrote a while ago. It was suggested to me that instead of writing a graphical interface I should make it a web app with flask. The code I want it to run may take a while and I also want the user to be able to run multiple instances concurrently. I was told I should use celery for the concurrency.
Another major requirement is that feedback about the progress should be given to the user. Not knowing much about web programming from the start I did a bit of research to figure out how this can be done on the web and discovered server-sent events which seemed perfect to me. Trying to figure out how to do this in Flask, I found http://flask.pocoo.org/snippets/116/ which I got to work as described. After learning about celery and getting the example at http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/patterns/celery/ to work, I tried creating a simple example of a task that would have some sort of state that would update over time and feed that back to the user. The problem I ran into was that my celery tasks didn't seem to start.
I then found an example where server-sent events were used in a chat program that used redis, so I thought I would try that, but I had the same result. Below is what I wrote to implement the subscribe functionality:
#flask_app.route("/subscribe", methods=['GET'])
def subscribe():
targetname = request.args['target']
print 'The subscribe function was called with target: ' + targetname
return Response(buildSubscription(targetname), mimetype="text/event-stream")
I then have a celery task:
#celery.task()
def testPrint(printfunc,initvalue):
print "In testPrint"
x=hashlib.md5(initvalue)
i=0
while True:
time.sleep(5)
printfunc(x.hexdigest())
x.update(str(i))
i+=1
where celery is set by the make_celery function. I then have a function:
def ssePrint(mystring,sub):
print "In ssePrint"
red.pubsub(sub,mystring)
and a wrapper for that function:
def appPrint(subscription):
sub = subscription
def myprint(myinput):
ssePrint(myinput, sub)
return myprint
which is then called in
#flask_app.route('/start', methods=['POST'])
def start():
myobject = request.get_json()
testPrint.delay(appPrint(myobject['target']), myobject['target'])
When I then look at the shell that invoked celery, I do not see any tasks running. This happens when I also use gevent.Queue as described in the SSE Flask example.
My suspicion is that there might be an issue with communicating from a Celery task to something running outside of the task. Is there a standard way of extracting the kind of information I want from a Celery task? Should I consider another way of doing concurrency?
Thanks.

Python APScheduler how to disable logging

I set up APScheduler to run every second via cron schedule (kind of needed/wanted). Right now I have logger sending everything to console.
If it wasn't for logging is greatly important to what I'm working on, it'd be okay. But, I need logging. What I don't want is APScheduler's info logging. Stuff like this:
INFO at 2013-05-26 13:05:06,007 : Job "loadavg.run (trigger: cron[year='*', month='*', day='*', week='*', day_of_week='*', hour='*', minute='*', second='*'], next run at: 2013-05-26 13:05:06)" executed successfully
INFO at 2013-05-26 13:05:06,008 : Running job "cpu.run (trigger: cron[year='*', month='*', day='*', week='*', day_of_week='*', hour='*', minute='*', second='*'], next run at: 2013-05-26 13:05:07)" (scheduled at 2013-05-26 13:05:06)
I have this in my code after I add the cron jobs:
logging.getLogger("apscheduler.scheduler").setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
There's not any, as far as I know, configuration options for APScheduler to specify logging information, either.
I know I can specify the level of the logger to ERROR or something, but when it gets set to INFO I don't want all of this (what seems to be useless) information logged as well.

You can try this code:
logging.getLogger('apscheduler.executors.default').propagate = False

Here's my code, which works without complaining about missing handlers:
scheduler = BackgroundScheduler()
scheduler.start()
scheduler.add_job(every_minute, trigger='cron', second=0, id='every_minute')
logging.getLogger('apscheduler.executors.default').setLevel(logging.WARNING)
It does not disable scheduler logging completely, but it does remove the info messages the OP wanted to be rid of.

I will first assume that you are using APScheduler for cron-like behavior because if you were really running via cron(8) every second, it would
Be self-defeating because APScheduler claims it's a "far better alternative to externally run cron scripts…"
Probably thrash the system something awful
That stipulated, the beauty of the logging module is that it allows your application to have broad control over a library's logging behavior without touching its code. Unfortunately, it makes logging a little hard to understand at first.
Since the INFO level reports stuff that you aren't interested in you can:
class NoRunningFilter(logging.Filter):
def filter(self, record):
return not record.msg.startswith('Running job')
my_filter = NoRunningFilter()
logging.getLogger("apscheduler.scheduler").addFilter(my_filter)
These can all be specified dynamically with a logging configuration file but that's a little more magic than I've ever gotten into.