Installing Alligator

Installation of Alligator itself is a relatively simple affair. For the most recent stable release, simply use pip to run:

$ pip install alligator

Alternately, you can download the latest development source from Github:

$ git clone https://github.com/toastdriven/alligator.git
$ cd alligator
$ python setup.py install

Queue Backends

Alligator includes a Local Memory Client, which is useful for development or testing (no setup required). However, this is not very scalable.

For production use, you should install one of the following servers used for queuing:

Redis

A in-memory data structure server, it offers excellent speed as well as being a frequently-already-installed server. Official releases can be found at http://redis.io/download.

You can also install via other package managers:

# On Mac with Homebrew
$ brew install redis

# On Ubuntu
$ sudo aptitude install redis

Beanstalk

A simple & fast queue. Official releases can be found at http://kr.github.io/beanstalkd/.

You can also install via other package managers:

# On Mac with Homebrew
$ brew install beanstalk

# On Ubuntu
$ sudo aptitude install beanstalkd

Warning

Beanstalk works differently than the other queues in several notable ways:

  1. It does NOT support custom task_id``s. You can still set them and it will be preseved in the task, but the backend will overwrite your ``task_id choice once it’s in the queue.
  2. Dropping a whole queue is VERY inefficient.
  3. It depends on PyYAML & uses a known-unsafe parsing method, which could make you susceptible to MiTM attacks.

It’s still an excellent choice at large volumes, but you should be aware of the shortcomings.