radiosilence / django-cron

A heavily modified version of Dj Gilcrease's django-cron app. Now supports running from a 'real' cron job, multiple notification methods and more.

How to install django-cron

1. Put 'django_cron' into your python path

2. Add 'django_cron' to INSTALLED_APPS in your settings.py file

3. Add the following code to the beginning of your urls.py file (just after the imports):

   import django_cron
   django_cron.autodiscover()
   

4. Create a file called 'cron.py' inside each installed app that you want to add a recurring job to. The app must be installed via the INSTALLED_APPS in your settings.py or the autodiscover will not find it.

Example cron.py:

from django_cron import cronScheduler, Job, HOUR, DAY, WEEK, MONTH

# This is a function I wrote to check a feedback email address
# and add it to our database. Replace with your own imports
from MyMailFunctions import check_feedback_mailbox

class CheckMail(Job):
      """
      Cron Job that checks the lgr users mailbox and adds any
      approved senders' attachments to the db
      """

      # run every hours
      run_every = HOUR

      def job(self):
              # This will be executed every 5 minutes
              check_feedback_mailbox()

cronScheduler.register(CheckMail)

Notes on andybak's fork

• Feature: Run via normal system cron using a management command rather than the original request based triggering. Makes it usable on low-traffic sites where there might not be enough requests to reliably run your cron jobs.
• Feature: Changed time units for run_every to be minutes rather than seconds. This makes the numbers a bit less unwieldy and I couldn't see a need for the higher resolution
• Feature: Added some convenient time constants: HOUR, DAY, WEEK, MONTH (last one is actually 52/12 weeks)
• Feature: Email notifications of exceptions while running a job.
• Feature: Admin messages to all staff when jobs fail.
• Feature: Allow restarting jobs via a GET to [admin_url]/cron/restart/ (I know... I know... GET's shouldn't do this...)
• Feature: Support notifications and restarting jobs via the app django-admin-notifications if jobs have missed their schedule.
• Fixed: Registering jobs used to also run them - this tends to block the dev server if there are any long processes like a backup. Added a argument 'registering=False' to the method execute().

Extra installation steps

1. Add an entry to your crontab. I use

\*/1 \* \* \* \* /path/to/python /path/to/manage.py cronjobs >> $HOME/cron.log 2>>cron_error.log

(If you do PYTHONPATH wrangling in your .bash_profile then this might need moving into your manage.py or a similar wrapper script)

2. Add this to your root urls if you want to support restarting cron jobs via a GET

url(r'^admin/cron/', include('django_cron.admin_urls')),