autocron documentation#

autocron is a 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 to integrate to web-applications, like django, flask, pyramid or bottle. Because task registering is non-blocking it can also be used with async frameworks.

autocron makes use of the SQLite database as storage and handles multi-processing access to the database. SQLite is fast enough for low- to medium-traffic sites. Which are most websites.

The idea behind autocron is to make the integration of an asynchronous task handler for web-applications as easy as possible. This is often desirable also for applications that don’t need massive scaling. Vertical scaling will work. 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 long running tasks to background processes.

Here is an example how to use autocron with the flask web-framework:

# application.py
import time

import autocron
from flask import Flask

app = Flask(__name__)
autocron.start("project.db")

@autocron.cron("* * * * *")
def cronjob():
    # do something from time to time ...
    print("get executed every minute")

@autocron.delay
def do_this_later():
    # time consuming task here ...
    time.sleep(2)
    print("do this later")

@app.route("/later")
def later():
    do_this_later()
    return "delayed action triggered"

The command $ flask --app application run will start the application and autocron.start() starts the background workers. When the application stops, the workers are also shut down.

What next? For further details refer how to integrate autocron with different web-frameworks.

History#

autocron is the successor of autotask which was written 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. But it has strong roots in Python 2 and is bound to older django versions. autocron removes all this. Also another (unrelated) tool named “autotask” is out there in the wild. Therefore the rewrite and renaming.

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