Installing

To install django-cronjobs, first install via pip or easy_install, then just add cronjobs to your INSTALLED_APPS.

Registering a cron job

django-cronjobs includes a decorator to register a cronjob, and discovers registered jobs in the module <appname>.cron.

For example:

# myapp/cron.py
import cronjobs

@cronjobs.register
def periodic_task():
    pass

django-cronjobs will then recognize periodic_task as a valid job.

Running a cron job

To run a registered cron job, use the cron management command:

$ ./manage.py cron <job_name>

So to run periodic_task from above, you could use:

$ ./manage.py cron periodic_task

Additional arguments can be passed after the name of the task.

Locks

By default, cron jobs are locked so that only one copy of a given job can be running at a time. If you need to override this behavior, you can pass the lock kwarg to register:

from cronjobs import register
@register(lock=False)
def my_cron_job():
    # Multiple instances of me can run simultaneously.

If you run multiple sets of cronjobs on the same file system and need the locks to not collide, set CRONJOB_LOCK_PREFIX to something unique in your Django settings.