Django asynchronous tasks without Celery

2019-11-21T10:18:45+00:00

In this blog post I will guide you to implement Django asynchronous tasks without Celery. First of all I will define what I mean with the term “asynchronous task”.

Table of Contents

What are Django asynchronous tasks?
Enter the uWSGI spooler
Install uwsgidecorators package
Create the directory for the “spool files”
Create a tasks module in your Django application
Call the asynchronous task from your Django view
Configure uWSGI to use the spooler
Conclusion

What are Django asynchronous tasks?

Suppose that you want to perform a long running task in your Django web app, but you want to give an immediate response to the user without waiting for the task to finish. The task could be: sending an email, building a report, making a request to an external web service, etc. The response given to the user usually is a confirmation message that the task has started.

Every task that could take some time to complete should not block the request-response cycle between the user and your application.

If you Google for “Django asynchronous tasks” probably you’ll be directed to Celery as the way to implement asynchronous tasks with Django. Please don’t get me wrong: there is nothing wrong in Celery. Many successful projects use Celery in production with success. I also used Celery in a couple of projects, and it works well. What I find annoying is the additional effort.

Celery is yet another service to configure, launch and maintain.

Enter the uWSGI spooler

As I wrote in my other post Django – NGINX: deploy your Django project on a production server, I like to use the uWSGI application server. Well, it turns out that uWSGI provides a full featured, production ready, system to implement asynchronous tasks. They call it the uWSGI Spooler. Citing the uWSGI documentation:

The Spooler is a queue manager built into uWSGI that works like a printing/mail system.

You can enqueue massive sending of emails, image processing, video encoding, etc. and let the spooler do the hard work in background while your users get their requests served by normal workers.

A spooler works by defining a directory in which “spool files” will be written, every time the spooler find a file in its directory it will parse it and will run a specific function.

The uWSGI Spooler is very easy to configure!

Install uwsgidecorators package

To interact with uWSGI spooler from your Python code it is really convenient to install the uwsgidecorators package. Unfortunately there isn’t a recent version of uwsgidecorators on PyPI, but you can install it using apt:

sudo apt install python3-uwsgidecorators

If you use a virtualenv for your Django project (as you should) you can link the uwsgidecorator module in your virtualenv:

ln -s /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/uwsgidecorators.py /path/to/your/virtualenv/lib/python3.6/site-packages

Create the directory for the “spool files”

First of all you have to create the directory where uWSGI will save the “spool files” used by the spooler:

mkdir -p /home/ubuntu/tasks
sudo chown www-data.www-data /home/ubuntu/tasks

Please make sure that the directory is writable by the user running uWSGI, that is www-data in the example.

Create a tasks module in your Django application

Assuming that you have a Django app named app1 you should create a module named tasks.py in the app directory. The content of the module should be something like this:

import logging
try:
    from uwsgidecorators import spool
except:
    def spool(func):
        def func_wrapper(**arguments):
            return func(arguments)
        return func_wrapper

import django
django.setup()

from .models import Model1

logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)

@spool
def long_running_task(arguments):
    id = arguments['id']
    obj1 = Model1.objects.get(pk=id)
    obj1.long_running_model_method()

The try/except construct will let you test the code even when not running in a uWSGI application server, for instance when running locally using ./manage.py runserver. In that case the task will be executed synchronously, as it was a regular python function call.

The long_running_task function is the task you will invoke using the uWSGI Spooler. As you can see you have to decorate it with the @spool decorator, and the parameters for the task are passed in a dictionary called arguments.

In this example I’m using the Django ORM to get an instance of a model and to call a model method that will take a long time to complete.

Call the asynchronous task from your Django view

Here you can find how to call the asynchronous task from an example view:

from django.shortcuts import redirect
from django.contrib import messages

from .tasks import long_running_task

def async_view(request, id):
    long_running_task(id=id)
    messages.add_message(request, messages.SUCCESS,
        'Task started correctly')
    return redirect('some_other_view')

Here I call the task, then I use the Django messages framework to show the user a confirmation message on the next page view, and finally I redirect the user to another view.

Configure uWSGI to use the spooler

To configure the uWSGI Spooler you should edit the uWSGI configuration file I presented in the post Django – NGINX: deploy your Django project on a production server. The file is located here: /etc/uwsgi/apps-enabled/django.ini. The content of the file should be something like this:

[uwsgi]
chdir = /home/ubuntu/django_project # customize with your django installation directory
env = DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=project.settings.production # customize with your settings module
wsgi-file = project/wsgi.py # customize with the relative path to your wsgi.py file
workers = 1
spooler-chdir = /home/ubuntu/django_project # customize with your django installation directory
spooler = /home/ubuntu/tasks/
import = app1.tasks

Restart uWSGI with:

service uwsgi restart

You will find the uWSGI logs in /var/log/uwsgi/apps/django.log. Therefore you can check them to see if the Python process started correctly or there are issues.

In the log file you’ll also find messages about the Spooler, something like this:

Mon Nov 18 14:50:45 2019 - [spooler /home/ubuntu/tasks pid: 8646] managing request uwsgi_spoolfile_on_www.example.com_8647_3_1383635828_1574067630_419736 ...

Conclusion

In this post I’ve shown how to setup Django asynchronous tasks using uWSGI Spooler. That is a simple and convenient way to perform long running tasks outside the request-response cycle. Especially if you already use uWSGI application server.

I used this technique in many different projects, for example an “Instagram like” photo and video sharing platform I built from scratch for the popular online magazine mtb-mag.com. In that case videos are processed asynchronously to make two versions suitable for all devices, in standard and high definition.

Please let me know if you have comments or question by leaving a reply below. Happy coding!

Guguweb - async