CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythondjangocelery
user3720855
user3720855

Reputation: 85

Celery django explanation

I have been learning about django recently and have stumbled upon celery. I don't seem to understand what it does. I've been to their site to no avail. Can anyone explain to me the concept and it's real world applications (in simple terms)?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 290

Answers (1)

maxov
maxov

Reputation: 341

Celery is an "asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing". It is just a task queue, or something that one puts tasks into to do as soon as possible. You have a celery instance that you integrate directly with your django or python app- this is what you use to talk to celery. Then, you can configure celery to have 'workers' that perform the tasks you give them. The whole point is to be able to do tasks that don't fit within the normal request/response cycle very well that django handles so well.

What kinds of tasks are these? Well, as said before, they don't fit into the normal request/response cycle. The best example I can think of is emails- if you're building a web app and you want to keep your users, you need to keep them engaged and coming back, and a good way to do that is by sending emails. You send them once a week or once a day and they can maybe configure when to send. This would fit horribly within the request/response cycle, but it's perfect for something like Celery.

Other examples are long-running jobs with lots of computation. While you would typically use something like Hadoop for really big computations, you can schedule some queries with Celery. You could also use it to schedule builds if you're doing something like Travis. The uses go on and on, but you probably get the point.

Upvotes: 4

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