This document describes the current stable version of Celery (5.2). For development docs, go here.

celery.contrib.abortable

Abortable Tasks.

Abortable tasks overview

For long-running Task’s, it can be desirable to support aborting during execution. Of course, these tasks should be built to support abortion specifically.

The AbortableTask serves as a base class for all Task objects that should support abortion by producers.

• Producers may invoke the abort() method on AbortableAsyncResult instances, to request abortion.

• Consumers (workers) should periodically check (and honor!) the is_aborted() method at controlled points in their task’s run() method. The more often, the better.

The necessary intermediate communication is dealt with by the AbortableTask implementation.

Usage example

In the consumer:

from __future__ import absolute_import

from celery.contrib.abortable import AbortableTask
from celery.utils.log import get_task_logger

from proj.celery import app

logger = get_logger(__name__)

@app.task(bind=True, base=AbortableTask)
def long_running_task(self):
    results = []
    for i in range(100):
        # check after every 5 iterations...
        # (or alternatively, check when some timer is due)
        if not i % 5:
            if self.is_aborted():
                # respect aborted state, and terminate gracefully.
                logger.warning('Task aborted')
                return
            value = do_something_expensive(i)
            results.append(y)
    logger.info('Task complete')
    return results

In the producer:

from __future__ import absolute_import

import time

from proj.tasks import MyLongRunningTask

def myview(request):
    # result is of type AbortableAsyncResult
    result = long_running_task.delay()

    # abort the task after 10 seconds
    time.sleep(10)
    result.abort()

After the result.abort() call, the task execution isn’t aborted immediately. In fact, it’s not guaranteed to abort at all. Keep checking result.state status, or call result.get(timeout=) to have it block until the task is finished.

Note

In order to abort tasks, there needs to be communication between the producer and the consumer. This is currently implemented through the database backend. Therefore, this class will only work with the database backends.

class celery.contrib.abortable.AbortableAsyncResult(id, backend=None, task_name=None, app=None, parent=None)

Represents an abortable result.

Specifically, this gives the AsyncResult a abort() method, that sets the state of the underlying Task to ‘ABORTED’.

abort()

Set the state of the task to ABORTED.

Abortable tasks monitor their state at regular intervals and terminate execution if so.

Warning

Be aware that invoking this method does not guarantee when the task will be aborted (or even if the task will be aborted at all).

is_aborted()

Return True if the task is (being) aborted.

class celery.contrib.abortable.AbortableTask

Task that can be aborted.

This serves as a base class for all Task’s that support aborting during execution.

All subclasses of AbortableTask must call the is_aborted() method periodically and act accordingly when the call evaluates to True.

AsyncResult(task_id)

Return the accompanying AbortableAsyncResult instance.

abstract = True

Deprecated attribute abstract here for compatibility.

is_aborted(**kwargs)

Return true if task is aborted.

Checks against the backend whether this AbortableAsyncResult is ABORTED.

Always return False in case the task_id parameter refers to a regular (non-abortable) Task.

Be aware that invoking this method will cause a hit in the backend (for example a database query), so find a good balance between calling it regularly (for responsiveness), but not too often (for performance).