About Background Tasks

In Django, managing time-consuming processes within views is commonly done using background tasks.

Background tasks are functions handled by a task queue system such as Celery, Huey, or RQ. When triggered from a Django view, a task is sent to a broker, which acts as a storage system for task descriptions. Popular brokers include Redis, RabbitMQ, Amazon SQS, Apache Kafka, or even a database table.

To execute these tasks, a worker process (or multiple workers) must be running. Workers fetch tasks from the broker and process them in the background, allowing the Django application to remain responsive while handling long-running operations.

Django can optionally include a progress model to track the status of each task. Progress updates can be communicated back to the user interface using Ajax or WebSockets, providing real-time feedback to users.

This mechanism allows Django to handle tasks like sending notification emails, generating PDFs, performing complex calculations, calling external APIs, or synchronizing data asynchronously and efficiently.