Simple approach to launching background task in Django

Question

I have a Django website, and one page has a button (or link) that when clicked will launch a somewhat long running task. Obviously I want to launch this task as a background task and immediately return a result to the user. I want to implement this using a simple approach that will not require me to install and learn a whole new messaging architecture like Celery for example. I do not want to use Celery! I just want to use a simple approach that I can set up and get running over the next half hour or so. Isn't there a simple way to do this in Django without having to add (yet another) 3rd party package?

Answer 1

Just use a thread.

import threading  t = threading.Thread(target=long_process,                             args=args,                             kwargs=kwargs) t.setDaemon(True) t.start() return HttpResponse() 

See this question for more details: Can Django do multi-thread works?

Answer 2

Have a look at django-background-tasks - it does exactly what you need and doesn't need any additional services to be running like RabbitMQ or Redis. It manages a task queue in the database and has a Django management command which you can run once or as a cron job.