Purpose

Running long processes from django is hard. There are many service based solutions, but those aren't always wanted.

This lib spawns a new process from a django session. Typically used to run manage.py commands. If you need communication back to django, I use memcached to excahnge data.

posix_spawn() is ideal to use over fork() because it doesn't copy your database/network/file sockets to the new process. Running fork() inside django can cause major issues if you don't clean up correctly.

Usage

I assume your django app name is: website

1. Inside your django app, create a libs dir: $(BASE)/website/libs

2. copy django_posix_spawn into libs: $(BASE)/website/libs/django_posix_spawn

3. Run a command in the background:

    from website.libs.django_posix_spawn import posix_spawn, run_manage
    
    	#same as running: Echo 9
    posix_spawn( '/usr/bin/echo', ['9']) 
    
    	#same as runing: /usr/bin/python manage.py migrate
    run_manage( 'migrate' )
   

Tip of the hat

This code was taken from: https://github.com/projectcalico/python-posix-spawn I made modifications to:

• Run in python3
• Prevent zombie child processes
• Fit into django smoothly
• Compile C code without needing a custom setup/install script
• Handle arguments in a user friendly way