celery/docs/getting-started/next-steps.rst

.. _next-steps:

============
 Next Steps
============

The :ref:`first-steps` guide is intentionally minimal.  In this guide
I will demonstrate what Celery offers in more detail, including
how to add Celery support for your application and library.

This document does not document all of Celery's features and
best practices, so it's recommended that you also read the
:ref:`User Guide <guide>`

.. contents::
    :local:
    :depth: 1

Using Celery in your Application
================================

.. _project-layout:

Our Project
-----------

Project layout::

    proj/__init__.py
        /celery.py
        /tasks.py

:file:`proj/celery.py`
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

.. literalinclude:: ../../examples/next-steps/proj/celery.py
    :language: python

In this module you created our :class:`@Celery` instance (sometimes
referred to as the *app*).  To use Celery within your project
you simply import this instance.

- The ``broker`` argument specifies the URL of the broker to use.

    See :ref:`celerytut-broker` for more information.

- The ``backend`` argument specifies the result backend to use,

    It's used to keep track of task state and results.
    While results are disabled by default I use the amqp backend here
    because I demonstrate how retrieving results work later, you may want to use
    a different backend for your application. They all have different
    strengths and weaknesses.  If you don't need results it's better
    to disable them.  Results can also be disabled for individual tasks
    by setting the ``@task(ignore_result=True)`` option.

    See :ref:`celerytut-keeping-results` for more information.

- The ``include`` argument is a list of modules to import when
  the worker starts.  You need to add our tasks module here so
  that the worker is able to find our tasks.

:file:`proj/tasks.py`
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

.. literalinclude:: ../../examples/next-steps/proj/tasks.py
    :language: python


Starting the worker
-------------------

The :program:`celery` program can be used to start the worker:

.. code-block:: bash

    $ celery worker --app=proj -l info

When the worker starts you should see a banner and some messages::

     -------------- celery@halcyon.local v3.1 (Cipater)
     ---- **** -----
     --- * ***  * -- [Configuration]
     -- * - **** --- . broker:      amqp://guest@localhost:5672//
     - ** ---------- . app:         __main__:0x1012d8590
     - ** ---------- . concurrency: 8 (processes)
     - ** ---------- . events:      OFF (enable -E to monitor this worker)
     - ** ----------
     - *** --- * --- [Queues]
     -- ******* ---- . celery:      exchange:celery(direct) binding:celery
     --- ***** -----

     [2012-06-08 16:23:51,078: WARNING/MainProcess] celery@halcyon.local has started.

-- The *broker* is the URL you specifed in the broker argument in our ``celery``
module, you can also specify a different broker on the command-line by using
the :option:`-b` option.

-- *Concurrency* is the number of multiprocessing worker process used
to process your tasks concurrently, when all of these are busy doing work
new tasks will have to wait for one of the tasks to finish before
it can be processed.

The default concurrency number is the number of CPU's on that machine
(including cores), you can specify a custom number using :option:`-c` option.
There is no recommended value, as the optimal number depends on a number of
factors, but if your tasks are mostly I/O-bound then you can try to increase
it, experimentation has shown that adding more than twice the number
of CPU's is rarely effective, and likely to degrade performance
instead.

Including the default multiprocessing pool, Celery also supports using
Eventlet, Gevent, and threads (see :ref:`concurrency`).

-- *Events* is an option that when enabled causes Celery to send
monitoring messages (events) for actions occurring in the worker.
These can be used by monitor programs like ``celery events``,
and Flower - the real-time Celery monitor, which you can read about in
the :ref:`Monitoring and Management guide <guide-monitoring>`.

-- *Queues* is the list of queues that the worker will consume
tasks from.  The worker can be told to consume from several queues
at once, and this is used to route messages to specific workers
as a means for Quality of Service, separation of concerns,
and emulating priorities, all described in the :ref:`Routing Guide
<guide-routing>`.

You can get a complete list of command-line arguments
by passing in the `--help` flag:

.. code-block:: bash

    $ celery worker --help

These options are described in more detailed in the :ref:`Workers Guide <guide-workers>`.

Stopping the worker
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To stop the worker simply hit Ctrl+C.  A list of signals supported
by the worker is detailed in the :ref:`Workers Guide <guide-workers>`.

In the background
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In production you will want to run the worker in the background, this is
described in detail in the :ref:`daemonization tutorial <daemonizing>`.

The daemonization scripts uses the :program:`celery multi` command to
start one or more workers in the background:

.. code-block:: bash

    $ celery multi start w1 -A proj -l info
    celery multi v3.1.0 (Cipater)
    > Starting nodes...
        > w1.halcyon.local: OK

You can restart it too:

.. code-block:: bash

    $ celery multi restart w1 -A proj -l info
    celery multi v3.1.0 (Cipater)
    > Stopping nodes...
        > w1.halcyon.local: TERM -> 64024
    > Waiting for 1 node.....
        > w1.halcyon.local: OK
    > Restarting node w1.halcyon.local: OK
    celery multi v3.1.0 (Cipater)
    > Stopping nodes...
        > w1.halcyon.local: TERM -> 64052

or stop it:

.. code-block:: bash

    $ celery multi stop w1 -A proj -l info

The ``stop`` command is asynchronous so it will not wait for the
worker to shutdown.  You will probably want to use the ``stopwait`` command
instead which will ensure all currently executing tasks is completed:

.. code-block:: bash

    $ celery multi stopwait w1 -A proj -l info

.. note::

    :program:`celery multi` doesn't store information about workers
    so you need to use the same command-line arguments when
    restarting.  Only the same pidfile and logfile arguments must be
    used when stopping.

By default it will create pid and log files in the current directory,
to protect against multiple workers launching on top of each other
you are encouraged to put these in a dedicated directory:

.. code-block:: bash

    $ mkdir -p /var/run/celery
    $ mkdir -p /var/log/celery
    $ celery multi start w1 -A proj -l info --pidfile=/var/run/celery/%n.pid \
                                            --logfile=/var/log/celery/%n.pid

With the multi command you can start multiple workers, and there is a powerful
command-line syntax to specify arguments for different workers too,
e.g:

.. code-block:: bash

    $ celery multi start 10 -A proj -l info -Q:1-3 images,video -Q:4,5 data \
        -Q default -L:4,5 debug

For more examples see the :mod:`~celery.bin.multi` module in the API
reference.

.. _app-argument:

About the :option:`--app` argument
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The :option:`--app` argument specifies the Celery app instance to use,
it must be in the form of ``module.path:celery``, where the part before the colon
is the name of the module, and the attribute name comes last.
If a package name is specified instead it will automatically
try to find a ``celery`` module in that package, and if the name
is a module it will try to find a ``celery`` attribute in that module.
This means that these are all equal:

.. code-block:: bash

    $ celery --app=proj
    $ celery --app=proj.celery:
    $ celery --app=proj.celery:celery


.. _calling-tasks:

Calling Tasks
=============

You can call a task using the :meth:`delay` method::

    >>> add.delay(2, 2)

This method is actually a star-argument shortcut to another method called
:meth:`apply_async`::

    >>> add.apply_async((2, 2))

The latter enables you to specify execution options like the time to run
(countdown), the queue it should be sent to and so on::

    >>> add.apply_async((2, 2), queue='lopri', countdown=10)

In the above example the task will be sent to a queue named ``lopri`` and the
task will execute, at the earliest, 10 seconds after the message was sent.

Applying the task directly will execute the task in the current process,
so that no message is sent::

    >>> add(2, 2)
    4

These three methods - :meth:`delay`, :meth:`apply_async`, and applying
(``__call__``), represents the Celery calling API, which are also used for
subtasks.

A more detailed overview of the Calling API can be found in the
:ref:`Calling User Guide <guide-calling>`.

Every task invocation will be given a unique identifier (an UUID), this
is the task id.

The ``delay`` and ``apply_async`` methods return an :class:`~@AsyncResult`
instance, which can be used to keep track of the tasks execution state.
But for this you need to enable a :ref:`result backend <task-result-backends>` so that
the state can be stored somewhere.

Results are disabled by default because of the fact that there is no result
backend that suits every application, so to choose one you need to consider
the drawbacks of each individual backend.  For many tasks
keeping the return value isn't even very useful, so it's a sensible default to
have.  Also note that result backends are not used for monitoring tasks and workers,
for that Celery uses dedicated event messages (see :ref:`guide-monitoring`).

If you have a result backend configured you can retrieve the return
value of a task::

    >>> res = add.delay(2, 2)
    >>> res.get(timeout=1)
    4

You can find the task's id by looking at the :attr:`id` attribute::

    >>> res.id
    d6b3aea2-fb9b-4ebc-8da4-848818db9114

You can also inspect the exception and traceback if the task raised an
exception, in fact ``result.get()`` will propagate any errors by default::

    >>> res = add.delay(2)
    >>> res.get(timeout=1)
    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
    File "/opt/devel/celery/celery/result.py", line 113, in get
        interval=interval)
    File "/opt/devel/celery/celery/backends/amqp.py", line 138, in wait_for
        raise self.exception_to_python(meta['result'])
    TypeError: add() takes exactly 2 arguments (1 given)

If you don't wish for the errors to propagate then you can disable that
by passing the ``propagate`` argument::

    >>> res.get(propagate=False)
    TypeError('add() takes exactly 2 arguments (1 given)',)

In this case it will return the exception instance raised instead,
and so to check whether the task succeeded or failed you will have to
use the corresponding methods on the result instance::

    >>> res.failed()
    True

    >>> res.successful()
    False

So how does it know if the task has failed or not?  It can find out by looking
at the tasks *state*::

    >>> res.state
    'FAILURE'

A task can only be in a single state, but it can progress through several
states. The stages of a typical task can be::

    PENDING -> STARTED -> SUCCESS

The started state is a special state that is only recorded if the
:setting:`CELERY_TRACK_STARTED` setting is enabled, or if the
``@task(track_started=True)`` option is set for the task.

The pending state is actually not a recorded state, but rather
the default state for any task id that is unknown, which you can see
from this example::

    >>> from proj.celery import celery

    >>> res = celery.AsyncResult('this-id-does-not-exist')
    >>> res.state
    'PENDING'

If the task is retried the stages can become even more complex,
e.g, for a task that is retried two times the stages would be::

    PENDING -> STARTED -> RETRY -> STARTED -> RETRY -> STARTED -> SUCCESS

To read more about task states you should see the :ref:`task-states` section
in the tasks user guide.

Calling tasks is described in detail in the
:ref:`Calling Guide <guide-calling>`.

.. _designing-workflows:

*Canvas*: Designing Workflows
=============================

You just learned how to call a task using the tasks ``delay`` method,
and this is often all you need, but sometimes you may want to pass the
signature of a task invocation to another process or as an argument to another
function, for this Celery uses something called *subtasks*.

A subtask wraps the arguments and execution options of a single task
invocation in a way such that it can be passed to functions or even serialized
and sent across the wire.

You can create a subtask for the ``add`` task using the arguments ``(2, 2)``,
and a countdown of 10 seconds like this::

    >>> add.subtask((2, 2), countdown=10)
    tasks.add(2, 2)

There is also a shortcut using star arguments::

    >>> add.s(2, 2)
    tasks.add(2, 2)

And there's that calling API again...
-------------------------------------

Subtask instances also supports the calling API, which means that they
have the ``delay`` and ``apply_async`` methods.

But there is a difference in that the subtask may already have
an argument signature specified.  The ``add`` task takes two arguments,
so a subtask specifying two arguments would make a complete signature::

    >>> s1 = add.s(2, 2)
    >>> res = s1.delay()
    >>> res.get()
    4

But, you can also make incomplete signatures to create what we call
*partials*::

    # incomplete partial: add(?, 2)
    >>> s2 = add.s(2)

``s2`` is now a partial subtask that needs another argument to be complete,
and this can be resolved when calling the subtask::

    # resolves the partial: add(8, 2)
    >>> res = s2.delay(8)
    >>> res.get()
    10

Here you added the argument 8, which was prepended to the existing argument 2
forming a complete signature of ``add(8, 2)``.

Keyword arguments can also be added later, these are then merged with any
existing keyword arguments, but with new arguments taking precedence::

    >>> s3 = add.s(2, 2, debug=True)
    >>> s3.delay(debug=False)   # debug is now False.

As stated subtasks supports the calling API, which means that:

- ``subtask.apply_async(args=(), kwargs={}, **options)``

    Calls the subtask with optional partial arguments and partial
    keyword arguments.  Also supports partial execution options.

- ``subtask.delay(*args, **kwargs)``

  Star argument version of ``apply_async``.  Any arguments will be prepended
  to the arguments in the signature, and keyword arguments is merged with any
  existing keys.

So this all seems very useful, but what can you actually do with these?
To get to that I must introduce the canvas primitives...

The Primitives
--------------

.. topic:: \ 

    .. hlist::
        :columns: 2

        - :ref:`group <canvas-group>`
        - :ref:`chain <canvas-chain>`
        - :ref:`chord <canvas-chord>`
        - :ref:`map <canvas-map>`
        - :ref:`starmap <canvas-map>`
        - :ref:`chunks <canvas-chunks>`

The primitives are subtasks themselves, so that they can be combined
in any number of ways to compose complex workflows.

.. note::

    These examples retrieve results, so to try them out you need
    to configure a result backend. The example project
    above already does that (see the backend argument to :class:`~celery.Celery`).

Let's look at some examples:

Groups
~~~~~~

A :class:`~celery.group` calls a list of tasks in parallel,
and it returns a special result instance that lets you inspect the results
as a group, and retrieve the return values in order.

.. code-block:: python

    >>> from celery import group
    >>> from proj.tasks import add

    >>> group(add.s(i, i) for i in xrange(10))().get()
    [0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18]

- Partial group

.. code-block:: python

    >>> g = group(add.s(i) for i in xrange(10))
    >>> g(10).get()
    [10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19]

Chains
~~~~~~

Tasks can be linked together so that after one task returns the other
is called:

.. code-block:: python

    >>> from celery import chain
    >>> from proj.tasks import add, mul

    # (4 + 4) * 8
    >>> chain(add.s(4, 4) | mul.s(8))().get()
    64


or a partial chain:

.. code-block:: python

    # (? + 4) * 8
    >>> g = chain(add.s(4) | mul.s(8))
    >>> g(4).get()
    64


Chains can also be written like this:

.. code-block:: python

    >>> (add.s(4, 4) | mul.s(8))().get()
    64

Chords
~~~~~~

A chord is a group with a callback:

.. code-block:: python

    >>> from celery import chord
    >>> from proj.tasks import add, xsum

    >>> chord((add.s(i, i) for i in xrange(10)), xsum.s())().get()
    90


A group chained to another task will be automatically converted
to a chord:

.. code-block:: python

    >>> (group(add.s(i, i) for i in xrange(10)) | xsum.s())().get()
    90


Since these primitives are all of the subtask type they
can be combined almost however you want, e.g::

    >>> upload_document.s(file) | group(apply_filter.s() for filter in filters)

Be sure to read more about workflows in the :ref:`Canvas <guide-canvas>` user
guide.

Routing
=======

Celery supports all of the routing facilities provided by AMQP,
but it also supports simple routing where messages are sent to named queues.

The :setting:`CELERY_ROUTES` setting enables you to route tasks by name
and keep everything centralized in one location::

    celery.conf.update(
        CELERY_ROUTES = {
            'proj.tasks.add': {'queue': 'hipri'},
        },
    )

You can also specify the queue at runtime
with the ``queue`` argument to ``apply_async``::

    >>> from proj.tasks import add
    >>> add.apply_async((2, 2), queue='hipri')

You can then make a worker consume from this queue by
specifying the :option:`-Q` option:

.. code-block:: bash

    $ celery -A proj worker -Q hipri

You may specify multiple queues by using a comma separated list,
for example you can make the worker consume from both the default
queue, and the ``hipri`` queue, where
the default queue is named ``celery`` for historical reasons:

.. code-block:: bash

    $ celery -A proj worker -Q hipri,celery

The order of the queues doesn't matter as the worker will
give equal weight to the queues.

To learn more about routing, including taking use of the full
power of AMQP routing, see the :ref:`Routing Guide <guide-routing>`.

Remote Control
==============

If you're using RabbitMQ (AMQP), Redis or MongoDB as the broker then
you can control and inspect the worker at runtime.

For example you can see what tasks the worker is currently working on:

.. code-block:: bash

    $ celery -A proj inspect active

This is implemented by using broadcast messaging, so all remote
control commands are received by every worker in the cluster.

You can also specify one or more workers to act on the request
using the :option:`--destination` option, which is a comma separated
list of worker host names:

.. code-block:: bash

    $ celery -A proj inspect active --destination=worker1.example.com

If a destination is not provided then every worker will act and reply
to the request.

The :program:`celery inspect` command contains commands that
does not change anything in the worker, it only replies information
and statistics about what is going on inside the worker.
For a list of inspect commands you can execute:

.. code-block:: bash

    $ celery -A proj inspect --help

Then there is the :program:`celery control` command, which contains
commands that actually changes things in the worker at runtime:

.. code-block:: bash

    $ celery -A proj control --help

For example you can force workers to enable event messages (used
for monitoring tasks and workers):

.. code-block:: bash

    $ celery -A proj control enable_events

When events are enabled you can then start the event dumper
to see what the workers are doing:

.. code-block:: bash

    $ celery -A proj events --dump

or you can start the curses interface:

.. code-block:: bash

    $ celery -A proj events

when you're finished monitoring you can disable events again:

.. code-block:: bash

    $ celery -A proj control disable_events

The :program:`celery status` command also uses remote control commands
and shows a list of online workers in the cluster:

.. code-block:: bash

    $ celery -A proj status

You can read more about the :program:`celery` command and monitoring
in the :ref:`Monitoring Guide <guide-monitoring>`.

Timezone
========

All times and dates, internally and in messages uses the UTC timezone.

When the worker receives a message, for example with a countdown set it
converts that UTC time to local time.  If you wish to use
a different timezone than the system timezone then you must
configure that using the :setting:`CELERY_TIMEZONE` setting::

    celery.conf.CELERY_TIMEZONE = 'Europe/London'

Optimization
============

The default configuration is not optimized for throughput by default,
it tries to walk the middle way between many short tasks and fewer long
tasks, a compromise between throughput and fair scheduling.

If you have strict fair scheduling requirements, or want to optimize
for throughput then you should read the :ref:`Optimizing Guide
<guide-optimizing>`.

If you're using RabbitMQ then you should install the :mod:`librabbitmq`
module, which is an AMQP client implemented in C:

.. code-block:: bash

    $ pip install librabbitmq

What to do now?
===============

Now that you have read this document you should continue
to the :ref:`User Guide <guide>`.

There's also an :ref:`API reference <apiref>` if you are so inclined.