Celery is a distributed queue that is very easy to pick-up. I’ll do two quick examples: one that sends a job and returns and another that sends a job and then retrieves a result. I’m going to use SQLite for this example (which is interfaced via SQLAlchemy). Since Celery seems to have some issues importing SQLite under Python 3, we’ll use Python 2.7 . Make sure that you install the “celery” and “sqlalchemy” Python packages.

Without Results

Define the tasks module and save it as sqlite_queue_without_results.py:

import celery

_BACKEND_URI = 'sqla+sqlite:///tasks.sqlite'
_APP = celery.Celery('sqlite_queue_without_results', broker=_BACKEND_URI)

@_APP.task
def some_task(incoming_message):
    return "ECHO: {0}".format(incoming_message)

Start the server:

$ celery -A sqlite_queue_without_results worker --loglevel=info

Execute the following Python to submit a job:

import sqlite_queue_without_results

_ARG1 = "Test message"
sqlite_queue_without_results.some_task.delay(_ARG1)

That’s it. You’ll see something similar to the following in the server window:

With Results

This time, when we define the tasks module, we’ll provide Celery a results backend. Call this module sqlite_queue_with_results.py:

import celery

_RESULT_URI = 'db+sqlite:///results.sqlite'
_BACKEND_URI = 'sqla+sqlite:///tasks.sqlite'

_APP = celery.Celery('sqlite_queue_with_results', broker=_BACKEND_URI, backend=_RESULT_URI)

@_APP.task
def some_task(incoming_message):
    return "ECHO: {0}".format(incoming_message)

Start the server:

$ celery -A sqlite_queue_with_results worker --loglevel=info

Execute the following Python to submit a job:

import sqlite_queue_with_results

_ARG1 = "Test message"
r = sqlite_queue_with_results.some_task.delay(_ARG1)
value = r.get(timeout=2)

print("Result: [{0}]".format(value))

Since we’re using a traditional DBMS (albeit a fast, local one) to store our results, we’ll be internally polling for a state change and then fetching the result. Therefore, it is a more costly operation and I’ve used a two-second timeout to accommodate this.

The server output will be similar to the following:

The client output will look like:

Result: [ECHO: Test message]

Celery has many more features not explored by this tutorial, including:

• exception propagation
• custom task states (including providing metadata that can be read by the client)
• task ignore/reject/retry responses
• HTTP-based tasks (for calling your tasks in another place or language)
• task routing
• periodic/scheduled tasks
• workflows
• drawing visible graphs in order to inspect behavior

For more information, see the user guide.