What's up Python? Django get background tasks, a new REPL, bye bye gunicorn

[mg]

What I love about Django is that you can create a Django project with just one file.

You can turn a fresh Debian machine into a running Django web app by just doing:

    apt install -y python3-django apache2 libapache2-mod-wsgi-py3

And then creating the one file Django needs:

/var/www/mysite/mysite/wsgi.py:

    import os
    import django
    from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application
    os.environ.setdefault('DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE', 'mysite.wsgi')
    application = get_wsgi_application()

    ROOT_URLCONF = 'mysite.wsgi'
    SECRET_KEY = 'hello'

    def index(request):
        return django.http.HttpResponse('This is the homepage')

    def cats(request):
        return django.http.HttpResponse('This is the cats page')

    urlpatterns = [
        django.urls.path('', index),
        django.urls.path('cats', cats),
    ]

And then telling Apache where to look for it:

/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf:

    ServerName 127.0.0.1
    WSGIPythonPath /var/www/mysite
    <VirtualHost *:80>
        WSGIScriptAlias / /var/www/mysite/mysite/wsgi.py
        <Directory /var/www/mysite/mysite>
            <Files wsgi.py>
                Require all granted
            </Files>
        </Directory>
    </VirtualHost>

And voilá, you have a running Django application, which you can expand upon to any size and complexity.

If you want to try it in a docker container, you can run

    docker run -it --rm -p80:80 debian:12

perform the steps above and then access the Django application at 127.0.0.1

[nomilk]

Blown away this is possible. When I was starting to learn to code and was overwhelmed when learning all the bits and pieces of rails, I wondered if everything necessary to run a very small app could be placed in a single file. I guess this is the answer, but in python/django instead of ruby/rails. It would be a fun exercise in ruby/rails too (not totally sure if it's possible, but suspect it may be, albeit probably resulting in a larger file than the one you give above!)

[Euphorbium]

There is like 10 python frameworks which achieve that with much fewer steps.

[BiteCode_dev]

Yes but how do you go about defining an ORM model without an app init class?

[aglione]

I don't catch if you are sarcastic or not

do you really consider this a lean process in 2024?

[devwastaken]

This is one of the core criticisms of Django and python web backends.

WSGI is old tech that in your example requires extra packages and code in project to work. By now Python should stand on its own and handle this independently, being proxied to by better http servers like nginx or caddy.

[mstaoru]

Background tasks look well thought out, looking forward to try that.

Despite being somewhat out of fashion, Python and Django continue to serve more down to earth software development well after so many years. I picked it up around 2007 (remember the "magic removal" branch), and it only got better ever since. Many call Python "toy language" or "data scientist language" but the truth is that 99.9% of modern web development is database-backed and, unless you have some strictly computational tasks behind your APIs, the fact that e.g. Rust is 100x "faster" than Python is mostly meaningless. Django just works. Of course, there can be different personal preferences, but I'm really amazed by the project that is closing in on 20 years that is still absolutely relevant and a joy to work with.

[boyka]

I've been looking for know anything resembling django's ORM _including_ migrations in rust, but haven't found a good replacement.

[pgjones]

Quart, the ASGI version of Flask, also has background tasks, https://quart.palletsprojects.com/en/latest/how_to_guides/ba..., and there is an extension Quart-Tasks, https://github.com/pgjones/quart-tasks, to run them on a schedule. Via

    @tasks.cron("*/5 * * * *")  # every 5 minutes
    async def infrequent_task():
        ...

In addition Hypercorn, https://github.com/pgjones/hypercorn, (a ASGI and WSGI) also does not use gunicorn, having migrated many years ago.

[geewee]

Django getting background tasks built-in is going to be really nice. It sucked having to manage celery or similar alongside it.

[nerdbaggy]

You should check out Huey next time. It is a lifesaver for us. Allows us to do the tasks via SQLite db

[develatio]

I have been doing Django for most of the last 10 years and I love it. I love Python. I love how well made are most of its core parts. And I love how some 3rd party packages (DRF aka django-rest-framework, django-filter, django-storages) fill the "missing" gaps.

That said, boy does Django must change it's current strategy...

RoR and Laravel have been getting all sort of goodies baked in the framework itself such as tasks queue, nice admin features, integration with frontend technologies (scss, js, even jsx/tsx), even entire packages to manage payment systems, mailing and so on... Good quality features that are ready to use and are integrated inside the framework, which easy to use APIs and fantastic admin integration.

Django devs, on the other hand, have been (imho) ignoring the users (devs) and have been denying any and all attempts at bringing something similar to Django. There are at least half a dozen packages for each "thing" that you want to do, and some are in a very good shape, but others are just hopelessly broken. What's even worse, because they're not part of Django, most of the time there are some edge cases that just can't be implemented without subclassing Django's core.

One of the most recent examples being Django's support for async operations. Except that Django itself doesn't provide a nice way to create / expose an API, which is why people use DRF. But DRF doesn't support async, which is why you need to add "adrf" (https://github.com/em1208/adrf) to DRF. But adrf doesn't support async generic viewsets, so you must add aiodrf (https://github.com/imgVOID/aiodrf) to adrf. But aiodrf doesn't support (...) you get the point. You end up in a situation in which you're pilling packages on top of packages on top of packages just so you can have an asynchronous API. Madness.

Supporting scss it another example of pilling packages on top of packages. It just never ends...

I can't express the desire I have for Django to start integrating packages into its core and get on par with RoR and Laravel.

/rant

[7bit]

DRF is cancer. Try doing anything simple with DRF and you got subclasses over subclasses with overrides and overrides. I hate DRF with all my heart. DRF works only, if you intend to exactly match your model. If deviate just a little bit, the complexity explodes in hour hand.

The biggest gripe I have with Django is that coupling it with modern UIs like Svelte and company is massively complex. The community has failed to deliver a clear guidance on how to handle implementation of such frameworks, including Vite and build steps. Which is the primary thing that drives me away from Django. I'm looking towards Laravel next. Very often, when researching how to implement JS Frameworks into Django I seem to find guidance on how to do this with Laravel and I want to know if it's really that comfy as it sounds.

[threecheese]

Love Django, but the issue we’ve had with tasks isn’t with performance, scalability, or devex - it’s with operations. Django-tasks afaict has the same issues as Celery/others in that there’s no Django Admin-like tool that reliably allows you to manage task execution, specifically failures. Without this, I can’t use async tasks for anything that’s important to the business or data consistency generally - which means I don’t use it at all, favoring “normal” queuing backends.

Is Django-tasks the solution that would permit this to be built?

[SCUSKU]

Second this. I’m amazed by the lack of any Django admin interface to start a task or see how it failed, it seems like such an obvious use case. I’ve tried Celery Flower but I found it lacking. I’m surprised because it seems like such a common use case, and given the size of the Django community I would’ve expected something to exist…

[wormlord]

Oh man, I wish this was a bit more mature. I am writing a distributed image processing app right now with Celery, Flask, and SQLAlchemy, but I am finding it difficult to KISS. I was tempted to use Django but couldn't justify the overhead. If they get this cleaned up in the next year that would be awesome!

[Paul-Craft]

One thing I have learned after nearly a decade in the industry is that you should just never, ever, ever use `celery`. It's overly complicated to program with; the monitoring tools are not great; and the one guarantee you can make is that at some point, you will have some kind of difficult to debug, mysterious failure involving it.

If I needed asynchronous background processing in Python today, I'd definitely be looking into `django-tasks.` If you asked me yesterday, I'd have told you I'd use SQS / whatever the platform equivalent was, or, failing that, I'd probably go with `dramatiq`.

Edit: LOL, I can't believe I forgot to mention what a fscking nightmare `celery` is to deploy and configure. UGH.

[dacryn]

justify the overhead? But you are using flask and sqlalchemy?

You made the wrong choice I would guess. Django does not have 'overhead' to justify in that scenario.

[ayhanfuat]

The new REPL looks great. Indeed qtconsole on steroid.

Edit: Ooops. IPython magics don't seem to work. I hope they add it.

[daft_pink]

My real pain point as a user with Django is deployment. Python is so much easier to write, but javascript is so much easier to deploy.

I wish they could make it easy to deploy django or other python framework in a serverless function with decent security baked in.

[7bit]

Where do you feel Django is harder to deploy? I have a different experience and think both are equally deployable.

[gonzo41]

Background tasks! I am effervescently happy to read this news.

[mmarian]

Hah, I just started using Django and was in need of background tasks!