Example creating interval-based periodic task

To create a periodic task executing at an interval you must first create the interval object:

>>> from django_celery_beat.models import PeriodicTask, IntervalSchedule

# executes every 10 seconds.
>>> schedule, created = IntervalSchedule.objects.get_or_create(
...     every=10,
...     period=IntervalSchedule.SECONDS,
... )

That’s all the fields you need: a period type and the frequency.

You can choose between a specific set of periods:

• IntervalSchedule.DAYS

• IntervalSchedule.HOURS

• IntervalSchedule.MINUTES

• IntervalSchedule.SECONDS

• IntervalSchedule.MICROSECONDS

There’s also a “choices tuple” available should you need to present this to the user:

>>> IntervalSchedule.PERIOD_CHOICES

Now that we have defined the schedule object, we can create the periodic task entry:

>>> PeriodicTask.objects.create(
...     interval=schedule,                  # we created this above.
...     name='Importing contacts',          # simply describes this periodic task.
...     task='proj.tasks.import_contacts',  # name of task.
... )

Note that this is a very basic example, you can also specify the arguments and keyword arguments used to execute the task, the queue to send it to[*], and set an expiry time.

Here’s an example specifying the arguments, note how JSON serialization is required:

>>> import json
>>> from datetime import datetime, timedelta

>>> PeriodicTask.objects.create(
...     interval=schedule,                  # we created this above.
...     name='Importing contacts',          # simply describes this periodic task.
...     task='proj.tasks.import_contacts',  # name of task.
...     args=json.dumps(['arg1', 'arg2']),
...     kwargs=json.dumps({
...        'be_careful': True,
...     }),
...     expires=datetime.utcnow() + timedelta(seconds=30)
... )

Example creating crontab-based periodic task

A crontab schedule has the fields: minute, hour, day_of_week, day_of_month and month_of_year`, so if you want the equivalent of a ``30 * * * * (execute every 30 minutes) crontab entry you specify:

>>> from django_celery_beat.models import CrontabSchedule, PeriodicTask
>>> schedule, _ = CrontabSchedule.objects.get_or_create(
...     minute='30',
...     hour='*',
...     day_of_week='*',
...     day_of_month='*',
...     month_of_year='*',
... )

Then to create a periodic task using this schedule, use the same approach as the interval-based periodic task earlier in this document, but instead of interval=schedule, specify crontab=schedule:

>>> PeriodicTask.objects.create(
...     crontab=schedule,
...     name='Importing contacts',
...     task='proj.tasks.import_contacts',
... )

Temporarily disable a periodic task

You can use the enabled flag to temporarily disable a periodic task:

>>> periodic_task.enabled = False
>>> periodic_task.save()

Downloading and installing from source

Download the latest version of django-celery-beat from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-celery-beat

You can install it by doing the following,:

$ tar xvfz django-celery-beat-0.0.0.tar.gz
$ cd django-celery-beat-0.0.0
$ python setup.py build
# python setup.py install

The last command must be executed as a privileged user if you are not currently using a virtualenv.

Using the development version

$ pip install https://github.com/celery/django-celery-beat/zipball/master#egg=django-celery-beat