Myujth

I am making a Django app. it needs to do background work (interacting with outside APIs) while the server is running, so it looks to me like I need to start a separate thread independent from all outside requests. What is the best way to go about this?

my first instinct was to simply import threading and start another thread, but where would I place that code in the Django app? is that even the right approach? do I need to make an outside service script that communicates with the app?

my googling has only lead me to things like django-background-tasks and celery, though from my understanding those solutions are only for tasks in views that take a long time, for returning the webpage before the task is actually done. do these solutions have support for background threads? I'm not looking for running a function every x amount of time, I want it to run forever from the moment Django starts.

I want it to be preferably self-contained inside the app, so a solution without an outside service script would be ideal. I want the app to be installable via pip.

If you plan to use celery, you can use celery beat to run the task periodically without it being triggered from a view. django-celery-beat allows you to manage the scheduling via django-admin. You still need to run the beat scheduler and the celery worker as separate processes.

However, implementing your task using celery might complicate the setup process for users installing your application via pip because they would also need to have celery properly setup.

A simpler approach to solving this problem is by implementing the task as a django management command that you then run from the command prompt and can schedule running it as a regular cronjob. Your users will still have to be reminded to configure the cronjob after installing your package.