Simple approach to launching background task in Django

Marc picture Marc · Feb 21, 2014 · Viewed 24.6k times · Source

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

Benjamin Toueg picture Benjamin Toueg · Feb 21, 2014

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?