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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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!

The new REPL looks great. Indeed qtconsole on steroid.

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

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.

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

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