Question

I’m currently working on a project and I’d like to integrate asynchronous task processing as well as some sort of message queue early on so that I’ll be able to scale up quickly by simply adding message queue processor servers to the cluster.

I came across Celery a while back and it caught my eye. Since it’s pretty well integrated with Django, I figured I’d get pretty good support with it. I’m just not really sure how to start, as there’s a lot of configuration involved.

For now, I’m running just about everything out of my Django project (serving static files, pipeline, etc.) so I’d like to have a messaging queue built in to run with django runserver if possible. (Don’t worry, this is only for development.) How can I get started using Celery with my existing Django project?

Answer 1

Celery has quite a nice documentation, also for those getting started, but two facts worth being mentioned for beginners:

• Use djkombu as the BROKER_BACKEND. This will give you a pretty simple message queue for development, where all messages are stored in the SQL database used by django. Due to celery’s api you can easily replace it with a “real” message queue for production:

  BROKER_TRANSPORT = "kombu.transport.django"

• Django-celery has a setting CELERY_ALWAYS_EAGER. If set to True there will be no asynchronous background processing, all tasks that are getting called via celery will be run synchronously (so no need to start any additional celery workers – very useful for debugging as well).