How to combine Celery with asyncio?

Question

How can I create a wrapper that makes celery tasks look like asyncio.Task? Or is there a better way to integrate Celery with asyncio?

@asksol, the creator of Celery, said this::

It's quite common to use Celery as a distributed layer on top of async I/O frameworks (top tip: routing CPU-bound tasks to a prefork worker means they will not block your event loop).

But I could not find any code examples specifically for asyncio framework.

Solution 1

EDIT: 01/12/2021 previous answer (find it at the bottom) didn't age well therefore I added a combination of possible solutions that may satisfy those who still look on how to co-use asyncio and Celery

Lets quickly break up the use cases first (more in-depth analysis here: asyncio and coroutines vs task queues):

• If the task is I/O bound then it tends to be better to use coroutines and asyncio.
• If the task is CPU bound then it tends to be better to use Celery or other similar task management systems.

So it makes sense in the context of Python's "Do one thing and do it well" to not try and mix asyncio and celery together.

BUT what happens in cases where we want to be able to run a method both asynchronously and as an async task? then we have some options to consider:

• The best example that I was able to find is the following: https://johnfraney.ca/posts/2018/12/20/writing-unit-tests-celery-tasks-async-functions/ (and I just found out that it is @Franey's response):

  1. Define your async method.

  2. Use asgiref's sync.async_to_sync module to wrap the async method and run it synchronously inside a celery task:

     # tasks.py
     import asyncio
     from asgiref.sync import async_to_sync
     from celery import Celery
     
     app = Celery('async_test', broker='a_broker_url_goes_here')
     
     async def return_hello():
         await asyncio.sleep(1)
         return 'hello'
     
     
     @app.task(name="sync_task")
     def sync_task():
         async_to_sync(return_hello)()
     

• A use case that I came upon in a FastAPI application was the reverse of the previous example:

  1. An intense CPU bound process is hogging up the async endpoints.

  2. The solution is to refactor the async CPU bound process into a celery task and pass a task instance for execution from the Celery queue.

  3. A minimal example for visualization of that case:

     import asyncio
     import uvicorn
     
     from celery import Celery
     from fastapi import FastAPI
     
     app = FastAPI(title='Example')
     worker = Celery('worker', broker='a_broker_url_goes_here')
     
     @worker.task(name='cpu_boun')
     def cpu_bound_task():
         # Does stuff but let's simplify it
         print([n for n in range(1000)])
     
     @app.get('/calculate')
     async def calculate():
         cpu_bound_task.delay()
     
     if __name__ == "__main__":
         uvicorn.run('main:app', host='0.0.0.0', port=8000)
     

• Another solution seems to be what @juanra and @danius are proposing in their answers, but we have to keep in mind that performance tends to take a hit when we intermix sync and async executions, thus those answers need monitoring before we can decide to use them in a prod environment.

Finally, there are some ready-made solutions, that I cannot recommend (because I have not used them myself) but I will list them here:

• Celery Pool AsyncIO which seems to solve exactly what Celery 5.0 didn't, but keep in mind that it seems a bit experimental (version 0.2.0 today 01/12/2021)
• aiotasks claims to be "a Celery like task manager that distributes Asyncio coroutines" but seems a bit stale (latest commit around 2 years ago)

---

Well that didn't age so well did it? Version 5.0 of Celery didn't implement asyncio compatibility thus we cannot know when and if this will ever be implemented... Leaving this here for response legacy reasons (as it was the answer at the time) and for comment continuation.

That will be possible from Celery version 5.0 as stated on the official site:

http://docs.celeryproject.org/en/4.0/whatsnew-4.0.html#preface

1. The next major version of Celery will support Python 3.5 only, where we are planning to take advantage of the new asyncio library.
2. Dropping support for Python 2 will enable us to remove massive amounts of compatibility code, and going with Python 3.5 allows us to take advantage of typing, async/await, asyncio, and similar concepts there’s no alternative for in older versions.

The above was quoted from the previous link.

So the best thing to do is wait for version 5.0 to be distributed!

In the meantime, happy coding :)

Solution 2

This simple way worked fine for me:

import asyncio
from celery import Celery

app = Celery('tasks')

async def async_function(param1, param2):
    # more async stuff...
    pass

@app.task(name='tasks.task_name', queue='queue_name')
def task_name(param1, param2):
    asyncio.run(async_function(param1, param2))

Solution 3

You can wrap any blocking call into a Task using run_in_executor as described in documentation, I also added in the example a custom timeout:

def run_async_task(
    target,
    *args,
    timeout = 60,
    **keywords
) -> Future:
    loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
    return asyncio.wait_for(
        loop.run_in_executor(
            executor,
            functools.partial(target, *args, **keywords)
        ),
        timeout=timeout,
        loop=loop
    )
loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
async_result = loop.run_until_complete(
    run_async_task, your_task.delay, some_arg, some_karg="" 
)
result = loop.run_until_complete(
    run_async_task, async_result.result 
)

Solution 4

Here is a simple helper that you can use to make a Celery task awaitable:

import asyncio
from asgiref.sync import sync_to_async

# Converts a Celery tasks to an async function
def task_to_async(task):
    async def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
        delay = 0.1
        async_result = await sync_to_async(task.delay)(*args, **kwargs)
        while not async_result.ready():
            await asyncio.sleep(delay)
            delay = min(delay * 1.5, 2)  # exponential backoff, max 2 seconds
        return async_result.get()
    return wrapper

Like sync_to_async, it can be used as a direct wrapper:

@shared_task
def get_answer():
    sleep(10) # simulate long computation
    return 42    

result = await task_to_async(get_answer)()

...and as a decorator:

@task_to_async
@shared_task
def get_answer():
    sleep(10) # simulate long computation
    return 42    

result = await get_answer()

Of course, this is not a perfect solution since it relies on polling. However, it should be a good workaround to call Celery tasks from Django async views until Celery officially provides a better solution.

EDIT 2021/03/02: added the call to sync_to_async to support eager mode.

Solution 5

The cleanest way I've found to do this is to wrap the async function in asgiref.sync.async_to_sync (from asgiref):

from asgiref.sync import async_to_sync
from celery.task import periodic_task


async def return_hello():
    await sleep(1)
    return 'hello'


@periodic_task(
    run_every=2,
    name='return_hello',
)
def task_return_hello():
    async_to_sync(return_hello)()

I pulled this example from a blog post I wrote.

View more solutions

Comments

[piro]

This didn't happen, and celery 5 is not compatible with asyncio.

[John Moutafis]

@piro I haven't used celery 5 as of yet, I will investigate it further! Thanks for the update

[MichaelR]

This actually seems a great solution, only issue that it does not support celery 5. Any timeline for this ?

[John Moutafis]

@piro Well, I did my research and refactored this answer, hope you can find something useful in there!

[John Moutafis]

Very nice, I found your article during my research on the issue and I included it in the edit of my answer (I am mentioning you of course now that I found it out)! Thank you for the knowledge boost :)

[Franey]

Thanks! It's always cool to see references to my articles pop up, even if it's within the same thread.

[Benoit Blanchon]

I opened a feature request and they answered "it is a part of a bigger design decision which we are planning for celery 6.0".

[John Moutafis]

@BenoitBlanchon very interesting! We will wait and see I suppose :)

[Benoit Blanchon]

Until we get official support in Celery, I found that polling the status of the AyncResult provides an excellent workaround.

[John Moutafis]

That's a solid workaround and we already use this (not as a decorator though) in the FastAPI application mentioned in my answer :) Keep in mind that you need to pay attention to the error handling and have a plan on how you want any potential exceptions to be handled!

[Benoit Blanchon]

task_to_async calls AsyncResult.get(), which re-raise any exception raised by the tasks. Of course, if you want to customize this behavior, you can add parameters to task_to_async and forward them to async_result.get().

[The Fool]

whats the point of wrapping the task in the async helper? couldnt you just implement the loop with sleep, without it? Afaik task.delay is non blocking. Only something like task.get would block.

[Tony Abou-Assaleh]

@BenoitBlanchon Is it necessary to poll? Why not simply do async_result = await sync_to_async(task.delay)(*args, **kwargs) followed by res = await sync_to_async(async_result.get, thread_sensitive=False)()? Passing thread_sensitive=False would ensure it does not block the main thread.