Alligator Tutorial

Alligator is a simple offline task queuing system. It enables you to take expensive operations & move them offline, either to a different process or even a whole different server.

This is extremely useful in the world of web development, where request-response cycles should be kept as quick as possible. Scheduling tasks helps remove expensive operations & keeps end-users happy.

Some example good use-cases for offline tasks include:

  • Sending emails
  • Resizing images/creating thumbnails
  • Notifying social networks
  • Fetching data from other data sources

You should check out the instructions on Installing Alligator to install Alligator.

Alligator is written in pure Python & can work with all frameworks. For this tutorial, we’ll assume integration with a Django-based web application, but it could just as easily be used with Pyramid, pure WSGI applications, etc.

Philosophy

Alligator is a bit different in approach from other offline task systems. Let’s highlight some ways & the why’s.

Tasks Are Any Plain Old Function

No decorators, no special logic/behavior needed inside, no inheritance. ANY importable Python function can become a task with no modifications required.

Importantly, it must be importable. So instance methods on a class aren’t processable.

Plain Old Python
Nothing specific to any framework or architecture here. Plug it in to whatever code you want.
Simplicity
The code for Alligator should be small & fast. No complex gymnastics, no premature optimizations or specialized code to suit a specific backend.
You’re In Control

Your code calls the tasks & can setup all the execution options needed. There are hook functions for special processing, or you can use your own Task or Client classes.

Additionally, you control the consuming of the queue, so it can be processed your way (or fanned out, or prioritized, or whatever).

Figure Out What To Offline

The very first thing to do is figure out where the pain points in your application are. Doing this analysis differs wildly (though things like django-debug-toolbar, profile or snakeviz can be helpful). Broadly speaking, you should look for things that:

  • access the network
  • do an expensive operation
  • may fail & require retrying
  • things that aren’t immediately required for success

If you have a web application, just navigating around & timing pageloads can be a cheap/easy way of finding pain points.

For the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll assume a user of our hot new Web 3.0 social network made a new post & all their followers need to see it.

So our existing view code might look like:

from django.conf import settings
from django.http import Http404
from django.shortcuts import redirect, send_email

from sosocial.models import Post


def new_post(request):
    if not request.method == 'POST':
        raise Http404('Gotta use POST.')

    # Don't write code like this. Sanitize your data, kids.
    post = Post.objects.create(
        message=request.POST['message']
    )

    # Ugh. We're sending an email to everyone who follows the user, which
    # could mean hundreds or thousands of emails. This could timeout!
    subject = "A new post by {}".format(request.user.username)
    to_emails = [follow.email for follow in request.user.followers.all()]
    send_email(
        subject,
        post.message,
        settings.SERVER_EMAIL,
        recipient_list=to_emails
    )

    # Redirect like a good webapp should.
    return redirect('activity_feed')

Creating a Task

The next step won’t involve Alligator at all. We’ll extract that slow code into an importable function, then call it from where the code used to be. So we can convert our existing code into:

from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from django.conf import settings
from django.http import Http404
from django.shortcuts import redirect, send_email

from sosocial.models import Post


def send_post_email(user_id, post_id):
    post = Post.objects.get(pk=post_id)
    user = User.objects.get(pk=user_id)

    subject = "A new post by {}".format(user.username)
    to_emails = [follow.email for follow in user.followers.all()]
    send_email(
        subject,
        post.message,
        settings.SERVER_EMAIL,
        recipient_list=to_emails
    )


def new_post(request):
    if not request.method == 'POST':
        raise Http404('Gotta use POST.')

    # Don't write code like this. Sanitize your data, kids.
    post = Post.objects.create(
        message=request.POST['message']
    )

    # The code was here. Now we'll call the function, just to make sure
    # things still work.
    send_post_email(request.user.pk, post.pk)

    # Redirect like a good webapp should.
    return redirect('activity_feed')

Now go run your tests or hand-test things to ensure they still work. This is important because it helps guard against regressions in your code.

You’ll note we’re not directly passing the User or Post instances, instead passing the primary identifiers, even as it stands it’s causing two extra queries. While this is sub-optimal as things stands, it neatly prepares us for offlining the task.

Note

Why not pass the instances themselves?

While it’s possible to create instances that nicely serialize, the problem with this approach is stale data & unnecessarily large payloads.

While the ideal situation is tasks that are processed within seconds of being added to the queue, in the real world, queues can get backed up & users may further change data. By fetching the data fresh when processing the task, you ensure you’re not working with old data.

Further, most queues are optimized for small payloads. The more data to send over the wire, the slower things go. Given that’s the opposite reason for adding a task queue, it doesn’t make sense.

Put the Task on the Queue

While it’s great we got better encapsulation by pulling out the logic into its own function, we’re still doing the sending of email in-process, which means our view is still slow.

This is where Alligator comes in. We’ll start off by importing the Gator class at the top of the file & making an instance.

from alligator import Gator

# Connect to a locally-running Redis server & use DB 0.
gator = Gator('redis://localhost:6379/0')

Note

Unless you’re only using Alligator in one file, a best practice would be to put that import & initialization into it’s own file, then import that configured gator object into your other files. Configuring it in one place is better than many instantiations (but also allows for setting up a different instance elsewhere).

Then the only other change is to how we call send_post_email. Instead of calling it directly, we’ll use gator.task(...).

# Old code
# send_post_email(request.user.pk, post.pk)

# New code
gator.task(send_post_email, request.user.pk, post.pk)

Hardly changed in code, but a world of difference in execution speed. Rather than blasting out hundreds of emails & possibly timing out, a task is placed on the queue & execution continues quickly. The complete code looks like:

from alligator import Gator

from django.contrib.auth.models import User
from django.conf import settings
from django.http import Http404
from django.shortcuts import redirect, send_email

from sosocial.models import Post


# Please configure this once & import it elsewhere.
# Bonus points if you use a settings (e.g. ``settings.ALLIGATOR_DSN``)
# instead of a hard-coded string.
gator = Gator('redis://localhost:6379/0')

def send_post_email(user_id, post_id):
    post = Post.objects.get(pk=post_id)
    user = User.objects.get(pk=user_id)

    subject = "A new post by {}".format(user.username)
    to_emails = [follow.email for follow in user.followers.all()]
    send_email(
        subject,
        post.message,
        settings.SERVER_EMAIL,
        recipient_list=to_emails
    )


def new_post(request):
    if not request.method == 'POST':
        raise Http404('Gotta use POST.')

    # Don't write code like this. Sanitize your data, kids.
    post = Post.objects.create(
        message=request.POST['message']
    )

    # The function call was here. Now we'll create a task then carry on.
    gator.task(send_post_email, request.user.pk, post.pk)

    # Redirect like a good webapp should.
    return redirect('activity_feed')

Running a Worker

Time to kick back, relax & enjoy your speedy new site, right?

Unfortunately, not quite. Now we’re successfully queuing up tasks for later processing & things are completing quickly, but nothing is processing those tasks. So we need to run a Worker to consume the queued tasks.

We have two options here. We can either use the included latergator.py script or we can create our own. The following are identical in function:

$ latergator.py redis://localhost:6379/0

Or...

# Within something like ``run_tasks.py``...
from alligator import Gator, Worker

# Again, bonus points for an import and/or settings usage.
gator = Gator('redis://localhost:6379/0')

worker = Worker(gator)
worker.run_forever()

Both of these will create a long-running process, which will consume tasks off the queue as fast as they can.

While this is fine to start off, if you have a heavily trafficked site, you’ll likely need many workers. Simply start more processes (using a tool like Supervisor works best).

You can also make things like management commands, build other custom tooling around processing or even launch workers on their own dedicated servers.

Working Around Failsome Tasks

Sometimes tasks don’t always succeed on the first try. Maybe the database is down, the mail server isn’t working or a remote resource can’t be loaded. As it stands, our task will try once then fail loudly.

Alligator also supports retrying tasks, as well as having an on_error hook. To specify we want retries, we’ll have to use the other important bit of Alligator, Gator.options.

Gator.options gives you a context manager & allows you to configure task execution options that then apply to all tasks within the manager. Using that looks like:

# Old code
# gator.task(send_post_email, request.user.pk, post.pk)

# New code
with gator.options(retries=3) as opts:
    # Be careful to use ``opts.task``, not ``gator.task`` here!
    opts.task(send_post_email, request.user.pk, post.pk)

Now that task will get three retries when it’s processed, making network failures much more tolerable.

Testing Tasks

All of this is great, but if you can’t test the task, you might as well not have code.

Alligator supports an async=False option, which means that rather than being put on the queue, your task runs right away (acting like you just called the function, but with all the retries & hooks included).

# Bonus points for using ``settings.DEBUG`` (or similar) instead of a
# hard-coded ``False``.
with gator.options(async=False) as opts:
    opts.task(send_post_email, request.user.pk, post.pk)

Now your existing integration tests (from before converting to offline tasks) should work as expected.

Warning

Make sure you don’t accidently commit this & deploy to production. If so, why have an offline task system at all?

Additionally, you get naturally improved ability to test, because now your tasks are just plain old functions. This means you can typically just import the function & write tests against it (rather than the whole view), which makes for better unit tests & fewer integration tests to ensure things work right.

Going Beyond

This is 90%+ of the day-to-day usage of Alligator, but there’s plenty more you can do with it.

If you need to customize task behavior, using the on_start/on_success/on_error hook functions can go a long way, but you can also create your own Task classes.

If you need more scalability, you can use multiple queues (by passing queue_name='...' when initializing the Gator instance) & lots of workers to distribute/fan-out the tasks.

You can create custom backends to support other queues (by passing backend_class=... when initializing the Gator instance).

And you can use your own Worker subclasses to customize how you process tasks.

All these things are in the Extending Alligator docs, so when you need more advanced things, you should check that out.

Happy queuing!