TaskTiger

TaskTiger is a Python task queue using Redis.

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Contents

Features
Quick start
Configuration
Task decorator
Task options
Custom retrying
Workers
Inspect, requeue and delete tasks
Rollbar error handling

Features

Per-task fork

TaskTiger forks a subprocess for each task, This comes with several benefits: Memory leaks caused by tasks are avoided since the subprocess is terminated when the task is finished. A hard time limit can be set for each task, after which the task is killed if it hasn't completed. To ensure performance, any necessary Python modules can be preloaded in the parent process.
Unique queues

TaskTiger has the option to avoid duplicate tasks in the task queue. In some cases it is desirable to combine multiple similar tasks. For example, imagine a task that indexes objects (e.g. to make them searchable). If an object is already present in the task queue and hasn't been processed yet, a unique queue will ensure that the indexing task doesn't have to do duplicate work. However, if the task is already running while it's queued, the task will be executed another time to ensure that the indexing task always picks up the latest state.
Task locks

TaskTiger can ensure to never execute more than one instance of tasks with similar arguments by acquiring a lock. If a task hits a lock, it is requeued and scheduled for later executions after a configurable interval.
Task retrying

TaskTiger lets you retry exceptions (all exceptions or a list of specific ones) and comes with configurable retry intervals (fixed, linear, exponential, custom).
Flexible queues

Tasks can be easily queued in separate queues. Workers pick tasks from a randomly chosen queue and can be configured to only process specific queues, ensuring that all queues are processed equally. TaskTiger also supports subqueues which are separated by a period. For example, you can have per-customer queues in the form process_emails.CUSTOMER_ID and start a worker to process process_emails and any of its subqueues. Since tasks are picked from a random queue, all customers get equal treatment: If one customer is queueing many tasks it can't block other customers' tasks from being processed.
Batch queues

Batch queues can be used to combine multiple queued tasks into one. That way, your task function can process multiple sets of arguments at the same time, which can improve performance. The batch size is configurable.
Scheduled tasks

Tasks can be scheduled for execution at a specific time.
Structured logging

TaskTiger supports JSON-style logging via structlog, allowing more flexibility for tools to analyze the log. For example, you can use TaskTiger together with Logstash, Elasticsearch, and Kibana.
Reliability

TaskTiger atomically moves tasks between queue states, and will re-execute tasks after a timeout if a worker crashes.
Error handling

If an exception occurs during task execution and the task is not set up to be retried, TaskTiger stores the execution tracebacks in an error queue. The task can then be retried or deleted manually. TaskTiger can be easily integrated with error reporting services like Rollbar.
Admin interface

A simple admin interface using flask-admin exists as a separate project (tasktiger-admin).

Quick start

It is easy to get started with TaskTiger.

Create a file that contains the task(s).

# tasks.py
def my_task():
    print 'Hello'

Queue the task using the delay method.

In [1]: import tasktiger, tasks
In [2]: tiger = tasktiger.TaskTiger()
In [3]: tiger.delay(tasks.my_task)

Run a worker.

% tasktiger
{"timestamp": "2015-08-27T21:00:09.135344Z", "queues": null, "pid": 69840, "event": "ready", "level": "info"}
{"task_id": "6fa07a91642363593cddef7a9e0c70ae3480921231710aa7648b467e637baa79", "level": "debug", "timestamp": "2015-08-27T21:03:56.727051Z", "pid": 69840, "queue": "default", "child_pid": 70171, "event": "processing"}
Hello
{"task_id": "6fa07a91642363593cddef7a9e0c70ae3480921231710aa7648b467e637baa79", "level": "debug", "timestamp": "2015-08-27T21:03:56.732457Z", "pid": 69840, "queue": "default", "event": "done"}

Configuration

A TaskTiger object keeps track of TaskTiger's settings and is used to decorate and queue tasks. The constructor takes the following arguments:

connection

Redis connection object
config

Dict with config options. Most configuration options don't need to be changed, and a full list can be seen within TaskTiger's __init__ method.
setup_structlog

If set to True, sets up structured logging using structlog when initializing TaskTiger. This makes writing custom worker scripts easier since it doesn't require the user to set up structlog in advance.

Example:

import tasktiger
from redis import Redis
conn = redis.Redis(db=1)
tiger = tasktiger.TaskTiger(connection=conn, config={
    'BATCH_QUEUES': { 'batch': 10 },
})

TaskTiger provides a task decorator to specify task options. Note that simple tasks don't need to be decorated. However, decorating the task allows you to use an alternative syntax to queue the task, which is compatible with Celery:

# tasks.py

import tasktiger
tiger = tasktiger.TaskTiger()

@tiger.task()
def my_task(name, n=None):
    print 'Hello', name

In [1]: import tasks
# The following are equivalent. However, the second syntax can only be used
# if the task is decorated.
In [2]: tasks.tiger.delay(my_task, args=('John',), kwargs={'n': 1})
In [3]: tasks.my_task.delay('John', n=1)

Task options

Tasks support a variety of options that can be specified either in the task decorator, or when queueing a task. For the latter, the delay method must be called on the TaskTiger object, and any options in the task decorator are overridden.

@tiger.task(queue='myqueue', unique=True)
def my_task():
    print 'Hello'

# The task will be queued in "otherqueue", even though the task decorator
# says "myqueue".
tiger.delay(my_task, queue='otherqueue')

When queueing a task, the task needs to be defined in a module other than the Python file which is being executed. In other words, the task can't be in the __main__ module. TaskTiger will give you back an error otherwise.

The following options are supported for delay:

queue

Name of the queue where the task will be queued.
hard_timeout

If the task runs longer than the given number of seconds, it will be killed and marked as failed.
unique

The task will only be queued if there is no similar task with the same function, arguments, and keyword arguments in the queue. Note that multiple similar tasks may still be executed at the same time since the task will still be inserted into the queue if another one is being processed.
lock

Hold a lock while the task is being executed (with the given args and kwargs). If a task with similar args/kwargs is queued and tries to acquire the lock, it will be retried later.
lock_key

If set, this implies lock=True and specifies the list of kwargs to use to construct the lock key. By default, all args and kwargs are serialized and hashed.
when

Takes either a datetime (for an absolute date) or a timedelta (relative to now). If given, the task will be scheduled for the given time.
retry

Whether to retry a task when it fails (either because of an exception or because of a timeout). To restrict the list of failures, use retry_on. Unless retry_method is given, the configured DEFAULT_RETRY_METHOD is used.
retry_on

If a list is given, it implies retry=True. Task will be only retried on the given exceptions (or its subclasses). To retry the task when a hard timeout occurs, use JobTimeoutException.
retry_method

If given, implies retry=True. Pass either:
- a function that takes the retry number as an argument, or,
- a tuple (f, args), where f takes the retry number as the first argument, followed by the additional args.
The function needs to return the desired retry interval in seconds, or raise StopRetry to stop retrying. The following built-in functions can be passed for common scenarios and return the appropriate tuple:
- fixed(delay, max_retries)
  
  Returns a method that returns the given delay or raises StopRetry if the number of retries exceeds max_retries.
- linear(delay, increment, max_retries)
  
  Like fixed, but starts off with the given delay and increments it by the given increment after every retry.
- exponential(delay, factor, max_retries)
  
  Like fixed, but starts off with the given delay and multiplies it by the given factor after every retry.

The following options can be only specified in the task decorator:

batch

If set to True, the task will receive a list of dicts with args and kwargs and can process multiple tasks of the same type at once. Example: [{"args": [1], "kwargs": {}}, {"args": [2], "kwargs": {}}] Note that the list will only contain multiple items if the worker has set up BATCH_QUEUES for the specific queue.

Custom retrying

In some cases the task retry options may not be flexible enough. For example, you might want to use a different retry method depending on the exception type, or you might want to like to suppress logging an error if a task fails after retries. In these cases, RetryException can be raised within the task function. The following options are supported:

method

Specify a custom retry method for this retry. If not given, the task's default retry method is used, or, if unspecified, the configured DEFAULT_RETRY_METHOD. Note that the number of retries passed to the retry method is always the total number of times this method has been executed, regardless of which retry method was used.
original_traceback

If RetryException is raised from within an except block and original_traceback is True, the original traceback will be logged (i.e. the stacktrace at the place where the caught exception was raised). False by default.
log_error

If set to False and the task fails permanently, a warning will be logged instead of an error, and the task will be removed from Redis when it completes. True by default.

Example usage:

from tasktiger.exceptions import RetryException

def my_task():
    if not ready():
        # Retry every minute up to 3 times if we're not ready. An error will
        # be logged if we're out of retries.
        raise RetryException(method=fixed(60, 3))

    try:
        some_code()
    except NetworkException:
        # Back off exponentially up to 5 times in case of a network failure.
        # Log the original traceback (as a warning) and don't log an error if
        # we still fail after 5 times.
        raise RetryException(method=exponential(60, 2, 5),
                             original_traceback=True,
                             log_error=False)

Workers

The tasktiger command is used on the command line to invoke a worker. To invoke multiple workers, multiple instances need to be started. This can be easily done e.g. via Supervisor. The following Supervisor configuration file can be placed in /etc/supervisor/tasktiger.ini and runs 4 TaskTiger workers as the ubuntu user. For more information, read Supervisor's documentation.

[program:tasktiger]
command=/usr/local/bin/tasktiger
process_name=%(program_name)s_%(process_num)02d
numprocs=4
numprocs_start=0
priority=999
autostart=true
autorestart=true
startsecs=10
startretries=3
exitcodes=0,2
stopsignal=TERM
stopwaitsecs=600
killasgroup=false
user=ubuntu
redirect_stderr=false
stdout_logfile=/var/log/tasktiger.out.log
stdout_logfile_maxbytes=250MB
stdout_logfile_backups=10
stderr_logfile=/var/log/tasktiger.err.log
stderr_logfile_maxbytes=250MB
stderr_logfile_backups=10

Workers support the following options:

-q, --queues

If specified, only the given queue(s) are processed. Multiple queues can be separated by comma. Any subqueues of the given queues will be also processed. For example, -q first,second will process items from first, second, and subqueues such as first.CUSTOMER1, first.CUSTOMER2.
-m, --module

Module(s) to import when launching the worker. This improves task performance since the module doesn't have to be reimported every time a task is forked. Multiple modules can be separated by comma.

Another way to preload modules is to set up a custom TaskTiger launch script, which is described below.
-h, --host

Redis server hostname (if different from localhost).
-p, --port

Redis server port (if different from 6379).
-a, --password

Redis server password (if required).
-n, --db

Redis server database number (if different from 0).

In some cases it is convenient to have a custom TaskTiger launch script. For example, your application may have a manage.py command that sets up the environment and you may want to launch TaskTiger workers using that script. To do that, you can use the run_worker_with_args method, which launches a TaskTiger worker and parses any command line arguments. Here is an example:

import sys
from tasktiger import TaskTiger

try:
    command = sys.argv[1]
except IndexError:
    command = None

if command == 'tasktiger':
    tiger = TaskTiger(setup_structlog=True)
    # Strip the "tasktiger" arg when running via manage, so we can run e.g.
    # ./manage.py tasktiger --help
    tiger.run_worker_with_args(sys.argv[2:])
    sys.exit(0)

Note that if you're using flask-script, you will still need to manually evaluate sys.argv to ensure proper argument parsing, instead of using a flask-script command.

Inspect, requeue and delete tasks

TaskTiger does not currently come with an admin interface, but provides access to the Task class which lets you inspect queues and requeue and delete tasks.

Each queue can have tasks in the following states:

queued: Tasks that are queued and waiting to be picked up by the workers.
active: Tasks that are currently being processed by the workers.
scheduled: Tasks that are scheduled for later execution.
error: Tasks that failed with an error.

To get a list of all tasks for a given queue and state, use Task.tasks_from_queue. The method gives you back a tuple containing the total number of tasks in the queue (useful if the tasks are truncated) and a list of tasks in the queue, latest first. Using the skip and limit keyword arguments, you can fetch arbitrary slices of the queue. If you know the task ID, you can fetch a given task using Task.from_id. Both methods let you load tracebacks from failed task executions using the load_executions keyword argument, which accepts an integer indicating how many executions should be loaded.

The Task object has the following properties:

id: The task ID.
data: The raw data as a dict from Redis.
executions: A list of failed task executions (as dicts). An execution dict contains the processing time in time_started and time_failed, the worker host in host, the exception name in exception_name and the full traceback in traceback.
func, args, kwargs: The serialized function name with all of its arguments.

The Task object has the following methods. Note that these methods only work for tasks that are in the error queue.

retry: Requeue the task for execution.
delete: Remove the task from the error queue.

Example:

from tasktiger import TaskTiger
from tasktiger.task import Task

QUEUE_NAME = 'default'
TASK_STATE = 'error'
TASK_ID = '6fa07a91642363593cddef7a9e0c70ae3480921231710aa7648b467e637baa79'

tiger = TaskTiger()

n_total, tasks = Task.tasks_from_queue(tiger, QUEUE_NAME, TASK_STATE)

for task in tasks:
    print task.id, task.func

task = Task.from_id(tiger, QUEUE_NAME, TASK_STATE, TASK_ID)
task.retry()

Rollbar error handling

TaskTiger comes with Rollbar integration for error handling. When a task errors out, it can be logged to Rollbar, grouped by queue, task function name and exception type. To enable logging, initialize rollbar with the StructlogRollbarHandler provided in the tasktiger.rollbar module. The handler takes a string as an argument which is used to prefix all the messages reported to Rollbar. Here is a custom worker launch script:

import logging
import rollbar
import sys
from tasktiger import TaskTiger
from tasktiger.rollbar import StructlogRollbarHandler

tiger = TaskTiger(setup_structlog=True)

rollbar.init(ROLLBAR_API_KEY, APPLICATION_ENVIRONMENT,
             allow_logging_basic_config=False)
rollbar_handler = StructlogRollbarHandler('TaskTiger')
rollbar_handler.setLevel(logging.ERROR)
tiger.log.addHandler(rollbar_handler)

tiger.run_worker_with_args(sys.argv[1:])

twik/tasktiger

TaskTiger