autocron documentation#
autocron is a simple asynchronous background task library to execute tasks in a separate process, not blocking the main application otherwise.
autocron does not need any dependencies beside the Python Standard-Library and is easy to install and easy to integrate into web-applications, like django, flask, pyramid, bottle, tornado or starlette. See usage for details.
autocron makes use of a SQLite database as message storage. This is fast enought for low- to medium-traffic sites. Which are most websites.
The idea behind
autocronis to make the integration of an asynchronous task handler as easy as possible. This is often desirable for applications that don’t need massive scaling. Vertical scaling will work but for horizontal scaling autocron is currently not designed.
All configurations are preset with useful values and can get inspected and modified by the autocron command-line based Admin Interface.
Installation#
autocron requires Python >= 3.8. The package is available on PyPi and installable by pip:
$ pip install autocron
Quickstart#
autocron provides two decorators: cron for recurring tasks and delay to delegate a long running task to a background process.
Here is a simple example how to use autocron with the flask web-framework that can be run with $ flask --app application run:
# application.py
import autocron
from flask import Flask
app = Flask(__name__)
autocron.start("the_flask_app.db")
@autocron.cron("* * * * *")
def cronjob():
# do something from time to time ...
@autocron.delay
def do_this_later():
# time consuming task here ...
@app.route("/later")
def later():
do_this_later()
return "delayed action triggered"
Calling autocron.start() starts the background workers. When the application stops, the workers are stopped too.
What next? Select your web-application of choice and learn how easy it is to integrate autocron to different web-frameworks and more details.
History#
autocron is the successor of autotask which was introduced in 2016 as a django-application to replace Celery on a given project for making monitoring and maintenance easier. Since then it has been used in production without any flaws (at least none has popped up in the used project). But it has had strong roots in Python 2, needed improvements for django >= 3.0 and was also bound to the django ORM for message handling. All this should be removed in an update. Also there is another (unrelated) tool named “autotask” out there in the wild. Therefore the rewrite and renaming.
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