Periodic tasks with Celery Beat in Django - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Periodic tasks with Celery Beat

📖 Scenario: You are building a Django app that needs to perform a task regularly, like sending reminder emails every minute. To do this, you will use Celery with Celery Beat to schedule periodic tasks.

🎯 Goal: Create a Django project setup with Celery and Celery Beat. Define a simple periodic task that runs every minute and prints a message to the console.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a Celery app instance in a file named celery.py inside your Django project directory.

Add a periodic task schedule in Celery Beat to run every minute.

Define a simple Celery task function called print_hello that prints 'Hello from Celery Beat!' to the console.

Configure Celery Beat in Django settings to enable periodic task scheduling.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Many web applications need to perform background jobs regularly, such as sending emails, cleaning up data, or updating caches. Celery Beat helps schedule these tasks easily.

💼 Career

Understanding how to set up periodic tasks with Celery Beat is valuable for backend developers working with Django to automate routine jobs efficiently.

1

Create Celery app instance

Create a file named celery.py in your Django project directory. Inside it, write code to create a Celery app instance called app with the project name 'myproject'. Import Django settings and configure Celery to use them.

Django

# Your code here to create Celery app instance

Need a hint?

Use Celery('myproject') to create the app. Set the environment variable for Django settings before creating the app.

2

Add Celery Beat schedule configuration

In your Django settings file, add a dictionary called CELERY_BEAT_SCHEDULE. Inside it, add a task named 'print-hello-every-minute' that runs the task 'myapp.tasks.print_hello' every 60 seconds.

Django

from celery import Celery
import os

os.environ.setdefault('DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE', 'myproject.settings')

app = Celery('myproject')
app.config_from_object('django.conf:settings', namespace='CELERY')
app.autodiscover_tasks()

# Add CELERY_BEAT_SCHEDULE dictionary in settings.py

Need a hint?

Define CELERY_BEAT_SCHEDULE as a dictionary with the task name as key and a dictionary with task and schedule keys.

3

Define the periodic task function

In your Django app folder named myapp, create or edit the tasks.py file. Define a Celery task function called print_hello that prints the string 'Hello from Celery Beat!'. Use the @app.task decorator imported from the Celery app instance.

Django

from celery import Celery
import os

os.environ.setdefault('DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE', 'myproject.settings')

app = Celery('myproject')
app.config_from_object('django.conf:settings', namespace='CELERY')
app.autodiscover_tasks()

# In myapp/tasks.py
# Your code here to define print_hello task

Need a hint?

Import app from your Celery instance and decorate the function with @app.task.

4

Enable Celery Beat in Django settings

In your Django settings file, add django_celery_beat to the INSTALLED_APPS list to enable Celery Beat integration.

Django

from celery import Celery
import os

os.environ.setdefault('DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE', 'myproject.settings')

app = Celery('myproject')
app.config_from_object('django.conf:settings', namespace='CELERY')
app.autodiscover_tasks()

# In settings.py
CELERY_BEAT_SCHEDULE = {
    'print-hello-every-minute': {
        'task': 'myapp.tasks.print_hello',
        'schedule': 60.0
    },
}

# Add django_celery_beat to INSTALLED_APPS below

Need a hint?

Add 'django_celery_beat' exactly to the INSTALLED_APPS list in settings.py.