Configure Django & Procrastinate to work together

Many Django projects are deployed using PostgreSQL, so using procrastinate in conjunction with Django would remove the necessity of having another broker to schedule tasks. Procrastinate is designed to play nicely with Django, let’s see how.

Prerequisites

For each Python version supported by Procrastinate, Procastinate is tested with the latest Django version supported by that Python version.

As of September 2024, this means Procrastinate is tested with Django 4.2 for Python 3.8 and 3.9, and Django 5.1 for Python 3.10+. This paragraph is likely to be outdated in the future, the best way to get up-to-date info is to have a look at the tool.poetry.group.django.dependencies section of the package configuration

Installation & configuration

To start, install procrastinate with:

(venv) $ pip install 'procrastinate[django]'

Add procrastinate Django app to your INSTALLED_APPS. You may want to add it before your own apps to ensure that procrastinate is ready before your own code runs.

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    ...
    "procrastinate.contrib.django",
    ...
]

Configuring the app

A Procrastinate app will be configured for you in procrastinate.contrib.django.app. You don’t have to configure an app yourself.

You can modify the app after its creation, for example to load additional tasks from blueprints, with:

# settings.py
PROCRASTINATE_ON_APP_READY = "myapp.procrastinate.on_app_ready"

# myapp/procrastinate.py
import procrastinate

def on_app_ready(app: procrastinate.App):
    app.add_tasks_from(some_blueprint)

Note

While not recommended, you may decide to use a different app from the one provided in procrastinate.contrib.django.app, it’s not strictly incompatible, but it might be more complicated and you may run into issues.