[Django]-Reporting yielded results of long-running Celery task

Paul’s answer is great. As an alternative to using mark_as_started you can use Task‘s update_state method. They ultimately do the same thing, but the name “update_state” is a little more appropriate for what you’re trying to do. You can optionally define a custom state that indicates your task is in progress (I’ve named my custom state ‘PROGRESS’):

def yielder():
    for i in range(2**100):
        yield i

@task
def report_progress():
    for progress in yielder():
        # set current progress on the task
        report_progress.update_state(state='PROGRESS', meta={'progress': progress})

def view_function(request):
    task_id = request.session['task_id']
    task = AsyncResult(task_id)
    progress = task.info['progress']
    # do something with your current progress

Celery part:

def long_func(*args, **kwargs):
    i = 0
    while True:
        yield i
        do_something_here(*args, **kwargs)
        i += 1


@task()
def test_yield_task(task_id=None, **kwargs):
    the_progress = 0        
    for the_progress in long_func(**kwargs):
        cache.set('celery-task-%s' % task_id, the_progress)

Webclient side, starting task:

r = test_yield_task.apply_async()
request.session['task_id'] = r.task_id

Testing last yielded value:

   v = cache.get('celery-task-%s' % session.get('task_id'))
   if v:
        do_someting()

If you do not like to use cache, or it’s impossible, you can use db, file or any other place which celery worker and server side will have both accesss. With cache it’s a simplest solution, but workers and server have to use the same cache.

A couple options to consider:

1 — task groups. If you can enumerate all the sub tasks from the time of invocation, you can apply the group as a whole — that returns a TaskSetResult object you can use to monitor the results of the group as a whole, or of individual tasks in the group — query this as-needed when you need to check status.

2 — callbacks. If you can’t enumerate all sub tasks (or even if you can!) you can define a web hook / callback that’s the last step in the task — called when the rest of the task completes. The hook would be against a URI in your app that ingests the result and makes it available via DB or app-internal API.

Some combination of these could solve your challenge.

See also this great PyCon preso from one of the Instagram engineers.

http://blogs.vmware.com/vfabric/2013/04/how-instagram-feeds-work-celery-and-rabbitmq.html

At video mark 16:00, he discusses how they structure long lists of sub-tasks.