2020-07-20T10:29:00Z
Run Your Flask Regularly Scheduled Jobs with Cron
A common need of web applications is to have a periodically running task in the background. This could be a task that imports new data from third party sources, or maybe one that removes revoked tokens from your database once they have expired. In this and many other situations you are faced with the challenge of implementing a task that runs in the background at regular intervals.
This is a pattern that many people ask me about. I've seen implementations that are based on the APScheduler package, on Celery, and even homegrown solutions built inside a background thread. Sadly none of these options are very good. In this article I'm going to show you what I believe is a very robust implementation that is based on the Flask CLI and the cron service.