autocron is a Python background task library with no dependencies beside the standard library. It works out of the box with webframeworks like django, pyramid, flask, bottle, tornado or starlette.
autocron makes it easy to delegate long running and recurring tasks to external processes. No hassle with configuration-files.
autocron is designed for the vast majority of webapplications that don't need massive scaling. And don't want to add unnecessary dependencies.
For installation use pip:
$ pip install autocron
or conda:
$ conda install autocron
autocron provides two decorators: cron that takes a string in cron-format as argument, but accepts also keyword-arguments like minutes and hours. And delay to delegate a long running task to a background process.
Here is a simple example how to use autocron with the flask web-framework that can be run with $ flask --app application run:
# application.py
import autocron
from flask import Flask
app = Flask(__name__)
autocron.start("the_flask_app.db", workers=2)
@autocron.cron("* * * * *")
def cronjob():
# do something from time to time ...
@autocron.delay
def do_this_later():
# time consuming task here ...
@app.route("/later")
def later():
do_this_later()
return "delayed action triggered"
After creating the flask app instance calling autocron.start(<databasename>) starts the background workers. The workers argument is optional and defaults to 1. The cron decorated cronjob() function will get executed every minute and the delay decorated do_this_later() function gets delegated to the background worker every time the application processes the /later url. Terminating the application will shut down the worker processes.
More information and examples how to use autocron with other frameworks are at the documentation.
The full documentation and release notes are at https://autocron.readthedocs.org