Show HN: FastScheduler – Decorator-first Python task scheduler, async support

[michielme]

Hi! I've built this because I kept reaching for Celery for simple scheduled tasks and it felt like overkill. I just needed "run this function every hour" or "daily at 9am", not distributed workers.

So it's decorators for scheduling (@scheduler.every(5).minutes, @scheduler.daily.at("09:00")), state saves to JSON so jobs survive restarts, and there's an optional FastAPI dashboard if you want to see what's running.

No Redis, no message broker, runs in-process with your app. Trade-off is it's single process only — if you need distributed workers, stick with Celery.

[languagehacker]

If Celery seems like overkill for your process, and you're really just looking to execute basic cron functioanlity, then why not just use crontab to invoke your Python script?

I can think of two major ways to operationalize a Python script that needs to run continuously. One is with containerization, which usually means Kubernetes, which already has a perfectly fine resource definition for cronjobs. The other approach is to run the script in a bare metal or VM, which would mean defining a service to ensure that the process can be managed appropriately, restarted if it dies, and the like. In other words, defining a service is about just as much effort as defining a cronjob, and there's no escape from some amount of "ops work" that isn't encapsulated in a Python script.

So why not just use the tried-and-true prior art than worry about building and supporting your own secret third thing that others would need to learn, support, maintain, and keep in mind when debugging a problem?

[michielme]

Fair point. Cron works fine for standalone scripts. This is more for when you want scheduled tasks inside an existing Python app without spinning up separate infrastructure.

[antonbassyk]

Looks interesting. Wondering how this is different from the more established https://github.com/agronholm/apscheduler ?

[michielme]

APScheduler is solid and more mature. Main difference is the API — FastScheduler is decorator-first so you get @scheduler.daily.at("09:00") instead of configuring triggers, executors, and job stores separately. Also has a built-in FastAPI dashboard.

[techjamie]

This is really cool, and I could see myself using this. Sometimes I need functionality like this, but can't be bothered to build up the infrastructure around it. This is perfect for that use case.

[michielme]

Thanks! Yeah that's exactly the use case — when you just need something scheduled without setting up a whole stack.

[fucalost]

This looks great OP. Do you have anything on the roadmap that you’d be open to receiving PRs for? I noticed there weren’t any issues in the repo and would be keen to lend a hand!

[michielme]

Definitely open to PRs! Still early days so lots of room for improvement. Feel free to open an issue if you have ideas.

[bityard]

I would deploy this today to run my backups if jobs could be defined in the UI as well.

[michielme]

Interesting idea. Right now jobs are code-only which keeps it simple, but a UI for defining basic jobs could work. I'll think about it.